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DAVIDSON COLLEGE DIVINITY LECTURES, 

OTTS FOUNDATION, 

SECOND SERIES, MDCCCXCVII. 



Christ Our Penal 
Substitute. 



ROBERT L. DABNEY, D. D., LL. D. 



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RICHMOND, VA.: 

The Peesbyteeian Committee of Publication. 



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COPYRIGHT, 1888, 
BT 

JAMES K. HAZEN, Secretary of Publication. 



* A^on. 



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.RfCFIVED. 




TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. Page. 

The Rationalistic Objections to Penal Substi- 
tution, ....... 5 

CHAPTER II. 

Definitions and Statement of the Issue, . . 10 

CHAPTER III. 
Objections Examined, 20 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Utilitarian Theory of Punishments, . . 38 

CHAPTER V. 

Retribution, not Revenge, .... 45 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Witness of Human Consciousness and Experi- 
ence, . . . . . . . . 58 

CHAPTER VII. 
Our Opponents' Self- Contradictions, . . 62 

3 



4 Table of Contents. 

CHAPTER VIII. Page. 

The Ethical Objection Considered, ... 71 

CHAPTER IX. 
What Scripture Says of Substitution, . . 87 

CHAPTER X. 

The Testimony of Christendom, ... 99 

CHAPTER XI. 
Conclusion, 106 



CHRIST OUR PENAL 
SUBSTITUTE. 



CHAPTEE I. 



Cfye nationalistic ©bjections to penal 
Substitution. 

THE student of religious discussion finds these 
objections as varied and pertinacious as 
though the blessed conception of righteous pardon, 
grounded in full satisfaction to law, were irritating 
and insulting to the objectors, instead of being at- 
tractive, as it should be, to all of us sinners. This 
cardinal conception is rejected by the multitudes 
of rationalizing nominal Christians through every 
party, from Socinians upward. They say that they 
must reject it as essentially unjust, as thus obnox- 
ious to necessary moral intuitions, and so impossi- 
ble to be ascribed to a righteous God. They say 
they must infer this from the Bible facts, that God 
strictly prohibits such substitution to civil magis- 
trates judging in his name (see Deut. xxiv. 16), and 
that he disclaims the usage for himself, as in the 
famous text, Ezek. xviii. 20. 



6 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

They claim that, while ancient or pagan peoples, 
taught by barbarism and debasing forms of reli- 
gions belief, made constant use of the cruel princi- 
ple of substitution in their antvpsychoi and host- 
ages, civilization, Christianity, and correct ethics, 
have banished these usages from modern Christen- 
dom. And this, they say, is but the testimony of 
a more enlightened, a better age, against the cruelty 
and injustice of substituting the innocent in place 
of the guilty under punishment. 

They argue that, since "God is love," we must 
not represent his penalties as meaning vengeance 
on transgressors, or simple retribution for supposed 
outrage upon his authority and personal honor; 
to inflict misery upon the transgressor for this 
purpose would not be holy justice, but malicious 
revenge ; and that this notion has descended from 
the pagan conceptions of their vindictive gods, 
who were apprehended rather as fearful demons 
than as a heavenly Father. Hence their only con- 
ception of divine justice is the remedial one. Pen- 
alties are but modified expressions of divine bene- 
volence, just like the chastisements and bitter medi- 
cines administered by loving parents to erring or 
diseased children, solely for their good, and as 
deterrents from future transgressions for them and 
their brothers and sisters. Hence the objectors 
infer, with loud triumph, that there can be no im- 
puted guilt and vicarious punishment, because the 



Rationalistic Objections. 7 

sick child must swallow his own physic in order to 
get any cure. The taking of it by a healthy com- 
rade can do him no good. They charge that the 
orthodox doctrine of the necessity of a vicarious 
satisfaction in order to pardon is directly contra- 
dicted by the duty of Christian forgiveness, so 
strongly enjoined upon us in Scripture. To for- 
give those who trespass upon us, without waiting 
for compensation for the injuries done us, is the 
loveliest Christian virtue. The Lord's prayer makes 
such forgiveness the absolute condition of our re- 
ceiving forgiveness from him. The apostle com- 
mands Christians to forgive their enemies "even as 
God for Christ's sake has forgiven them." But 
surely our Christian virtue should consist in our 
being like God. His perfections, therefore, do not 
prompt him to exact penal satisfaction in order to 
pardon. But the orthodox doctrine misrepresents 
God in an odious light, as a vindictive being who 
refuses to relinquish his own pique, no matter how 
penitent the transgressor against him, until his 
vengeance is satiated ; yea, so blindly vindictive, 
that he can be sat'.sfied only by hurting somebody, 
though that person be the innocent one. 

The more thoughful objectors also argue analyti- 
cally, that there can be no penal substitution in 
God's government, because penalty loses its whole 
propriety and moral significance when transferred 
away from the person of the transgressor. They 



8 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

ask, What is it that deserves penalty ? Everybody's 
common sense answers, It is the sin. But sin is 
not a substantial thing when abstracted from the 
sinner. In strictness of speech, sin is the sin- 
ner acting. The sinfulness and bad desert are 
nothing more than the attributes of the sinning 
person. Hence they infer that the penalty must 
be as inalienable as the personal ill-desert. 

Therefore, imputation can be but a legal fiction, 
and that an immoral one. Passing from abstrac- 
tions to concrete cases, they cry passionately, "How 
could any right mind view the punishment of an 
innocent person in place of the guilty except with 
righteous and burning indignation?" If you, Mr. 
Calvinist, were the victim of such a legal fiction, we 
surmise that all the dogmatism of the orthodox 
would fail to satisfy you under your unjust suffer- 
ings ! Therefore, the ground upon which God per- 
mitted a holy Christ to suffer and die must be 
otherwise explained. The places in the Scripture 
which see^ o teach his penal substitution must 
be so expounded as to expunge that doctrine out 
of them. 

So far as I know myself, I have above given the 
points and the arguments of the objectors with com- 
plete fairness and sufficient fulness. I have set 
them in the strongest light which their assertors 
could throw around them . I do not believe that the 
impartial reader can find any treatise advocating 



Eationalistic Objections. 9 

Socinianism, or the new theology, which makes as 
plausible a showing as I have now made for them. 
Does the array appear formidable? Yet if the 
reader will follow me faithfully, he will convince 
himself that these seeming bulwarks are built not 
of stone,' but of fog. They owe their seeming 
strength to half truths, false analogies, and defective 
analyses of elements. 

Now, reader, audi alteram partem, " A man 
seemeth right in his own cause until his neighbor 
cometh and searcheth him." 



CHAPTEK II. 

Definitions anb Statement of tfye 3ssne. 

THE standard which distinguishes between 
righteousness and sin is the preceptive will 
of a holy God. This legislative prerogative be- 
longs to him by right of his moral perfections, 
omniscience and righteous ownership of us as 
our Maker, Preserver, and Eedeemer. Our right- 
eousness is our intelligent and hearty compliance 
with that will. Our sin is our conscious and spon- 
taneous discrepancy therefrom. (1 John iii. 4: 
fj b-tia^zca lozlv -q avofila, original.) The badness or 
evilness expressed in any sin (and usually increased 
by it) is the attribute or subjective quality of the 
sinning agent. "Potential guilt" is the ill-desert, 
or merit of punishment, attaching to the transgres- 
sor by reason of his sin. This concept is not 
identical with that judgment and sentiment of dis- 
approbation which sin awakens in the conscience, 
though it springs immediately out of it. Where 
we judge that an agent has sinned, we also judge 
that he has made himself worthy of penalty ; that 
his sin deserves suffering, and this is a necessary 
and universal part of the moral intuition whose 
rise he occasions in us. Such is potential guilt. 

10 



Definitions and Statement of the Issue. 11 

Actual guilt (reatus) is obligatio ad poenam ex 
peecato, the debt of penalty to law arising out 
of transgression. It is the penal enactment of the 
lawgiver which ascertains and fixes this guilt. 
Hence, under a lawgiver who was less than omni- 
scient and all perfect, there might be sin, evil 
attribute and potential guilt, while yet the actual 
guilt was absent, because the penal statute defin- 
ing it did not exist. It thus appears that while 
evilness or sinfulness is an attribute, actual guilt 
{reatus) is not an attribute but a relation. It is a 
personal relation between a sinning agent and the 
sovereign will which legislates the penal statute. 
Now, when the Scriptures and theology speak of 
penal imputation or substitution, it is this relation 
only which is transferred or counted over from the 
sinning person to his substitute. "We do not dream 
of a similar transfer of personal acts, or of the per- 
sonal attributes expressed in such acts. 

Now let none exclaim that these are the mere 
subtleties of abstraction. They are the most prac- 
tical distinctions. They are recognized, and must 
be recognized, in the civil and criminal laws of 
men as much as in the government of God. Read- 
ers must observe that in sacred Scripture the word 
"sin" is often used by metonymy where the con- 
cept intended is that of actual guilt. Thus a pro- 
phet exclaims (Jer. 1. 20): "In those days, and 
in that time, saith the Lord, the iniquity of Israel 



12 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

shall be sought for, and there shall be none." The 
exact meaning of the word "iniquity" here must 
be actual guilt, else we should make the prophet 
contradict himself utterly by first charging on 
Israel very great sins, and then declaring that no 
sins of theirs existed, which is, moreover, a state- 
ment impossible to be true of any of Adam's race. 
In a multitude of places, God's mercy is said to 
"remit sins" (a<pe<rez). But actual guilt is what is 
meant. For God's act of forgiveness only removes 
our actual guilt from us; not sinfulness, as is 
proved by our own subsequent, most hearty con- 
fessions of unworthiness and sinfulness whenever 
God really forgives us. Or let us add another in- 
stance, since this distinction is so vital and so much 
overlooked. A thief steals a horse of a neighbor- 
ing benefactor, sells him beyond recovery, and loses 
the money at the gaming table. These acts of the 
thief give expression to much meanness or vileness 
of character. The market price of the horse was 
one hundred dollars. These acts have inflicted 
upon the good neighbor a pecuniary loss (damnum) 
of that amount. They have also laid the thief 
under the penal obligation of iiYe years or more in 
the penitentiary, as fixed by statute law. The 
good man, learning that the thief and his family 
are still suffering destitution, exclaims: "Oh! I 
freely forgive the fellow." What he means is that 
he, at the prompting of charity, remits to the 



Definitions and Statement of the Issue. 13 

thief his damnum, his lost hundred dollars, and 
suppresses the anger at first naturally and properly 
felt. The good man dreams of no such folly as 
that he can remove from the thief his attribute of 
vileness or release him from his legal debt of penal 
servitude ; he knows he has neither the power nor 
the right. The distinction between potential and 
actual guilt is found, perfectly real and solid, in 
numerous secular cases; as where the cunning 
manipulators of business corporations so juggle 
with the property of creditors and fellow-stock- 
holders as to inflict on them what is mere theft in 
the sight of God. But the sapient American legis- 
latures, while recklessly creating such corporations, 
have forgotten to enact any statutes fixing the legal 
penalties for these juggleries. Hence these men 
go unwhipped of justice, although the judges of 
the courts may be thoroughly alert and righteous. 
Abundant potential guilt is there, but for want 
of statute law the debt of actual guilt does not 
exist. 

The distinction between sinfulness as an attri- 
bute and as a penal obligation often receives more 
practical concrete application. Here is a treas- 
urer who has given an official bond upon which a 
friend goes security. The treasurer commits the 
felony of embezzlement, and by flight escapes the 
clutches of the law. Thereupon the Common- 
wealth forces the security to pay the official bond ; 



14 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

that is to say, it exacts from him the legal obliga- 
tion which is made his by imputation. And this 
exaction is, to the good man, a heavy penalty, a 
mulct, inflicting, perhaps, much suffering on him 
and his family. Does anybody dream that a 
shadow of the embezzler's meanness or sinfulness 
is transferred to, or infused into this generous 
friend, who suffers for another's crime? Not at 
all. All honor the unfortunate man for the gener- 
ous friendly help which prompted him to go secur- 
ity, and for the honesty with which he makes 
good society's loss. Yet the Commonwealth acts 
with perfect justice in exacting the money from 
him. Here is the clearest distinction between 
actual guilt and sinfulness; nobody is so stupid 
as to pretend not to see it. Let the vital proposi- 
tion be repeated, that, in the penal substitution of 
Christ, it is the actual guilt of sinners as above 
defined, and nothing else, which is transferred 
from them to him. And the whole question be- 
tween us and the objectors is this : May the sover- 
eign Judge righteously provide for such a substi- 
tution, when the free consent of the substitute is 
given, and all the other conditions are provided by 
God for good results f This issue is cardinal. As 
the church of all ages has understood the Scrip- 
tures, the whole plan of gospel redemption rests 
upon this substitution of Christ as its corner-stone. 
He who overthrows the corner-stone overthrows 



Definitions and Statement of the Issue. 15 

the building. The system which he rears without 
this foundation may be named Christianity by him, 
but it will be another building, his own handiwork, 
not that of God — another gospel. This is proved 
by the history of doctrinal discussions. There is 
scarcely a leading head of divinity which is not 
changed or perverted as a logical consequence of 
this denial of penal substitution consistently car- 
ried out. It must change the description of God's 
attributes, excluding his distributive justice from 
the catalogue of his essential perfections, and put- 
ting in place of it the morals of expediency. It 
must vitiate our view of God's immutability. It 
must change and lower our conception of sin as 
an infinite evil, because it assails the impartial 
justice, holiness and unchangeableness of an infi- 
nite God. He who pronounces the imputation of 
guilt to Christ morally impossible for God, has, of 
course, rejected the doctrine of original sin ; for 
that contains, as Paul teaches in Eomans v., a 
parallel imputation. Next, the church doctrine of 
justification must be corrupted, for that is founded 
upon the counterpart imputation of Christ's right- 
eousness to believers personally unworthy, which 
is just as bad as the other, if the objectors are 
right. The true office of faith must next be per- 
verted ; for the imputed ground of justification 
having been denied, there is nothing else to thrust 
into its place except the believer's faith. 



16 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

The doctrine of adoption must be changed ; there 
is nothing left to purchase it except the believer's 
personal obedience after the merit of Christ's pre- 
ceptive righteousness is discarded. The doctrine 
of the perseverance of the saints becomes an ex- 
crescence and an absurdity in this creed ; for the 
title and status of the Christian as a child of grace 
cannot be more stable than its foundation, and the 
only foundation left is the believer's own obedi- 
ence, which is incomplete and mutable. The 
whole doctrine of Satan and his angels, with their 
fall and eternal condemnation, must be rejected, 
since the theory asserts that the only penalties 
which the God of love can inflict must be reme- 
dial, whereas everlasting torments are not a remedy, 
but a destruction. Of course, this creed should 
reject eternal punishments of reprobate men, and 
teach universalism for the same reason. A proper 
belief in God's providence becomes impossible, 
because, if there was a special providence in 
Christ's sufferings and death, we should have God 
punishing Christ for other men's sins. How much 
now remains of the church theology? Did the 
limits of this treatise permit, the teachings of one 
or another of the objectors could be quoted, assert- 
ing each of these heretical inferences, and that 
logically from their denial of penal substitution. 
All of these errors are not charged upon all our 
opponents, for many of them are preserved from a 



Definitions and Statement of the Issue. 17 

part by a fortunate logical inconsistency. These 
objections against imputation are mostly of Socin- 
ian origin ; and consistently followed they will lead 
back to Socinianism. 

The doctrine of substitution is taught by the 
Scriptures so expressly in both Testaments, by 
types and didactic propositions, and with such 
iteration, that it cannot be eliminated from the 
Bible system without a license of exegesis destruc- 
tive of all faith in the inspiration of the Scriptures. 
Infidelity lies as the next remove from these disin- 
genuous misconstructions. Let these three propo- 
sitions be set side by side : Jesus was perfectly 
innocent; guilt cannot be imputed from a sinner 
to his substitute on any condition whatsoever; 
Jesus suffered the bitterest sorrows and death. 
Then there is but one way to reconcile them with 
each other ; it must be asserted that God's provi- 
dence does not direct what befalls even the best 
men, and that the evils of this life and the death 
of the body are not penal evils, but mere natural 
consequences, like the fading of the flower and 
the fall of the leaf. Such is theological result. Ob- 
viously, it assails God's word with the most express 
and insolent contradiction possible. It gives us 
practical atheism, that, namely, of the Greek Epi- 
cureans, for the god who exercises no providence 
over us in our most urgent circumstances is prac- 
tically no god to us. And after an utter rejection 



18 Chkist our Penal Substitute. 

of Scripture, it blots out every premise by which 
natural theology proves that there is a moral gov- 
ernment over mankind. Is there any deeper abyss 
of infidelity? Yet not only is the Socinian litera- 
ture, but the pretended " advanced Christian 
thought" of our day, loaded with denials of the 
moral possibility of penal substitution, confidently 
uttered by men who do not foresee whither they 
are travelling. A generation ago Jenkyn, Beaman, 
and Barnes excluded this vital truth from their 
treatises on the atonement. So the New Haven 
theology had done, and its parent, Dr. Samuel 
Taylor, of Yale; so does Dr. Joseph Parker, the 
great light of the English Independents; so does 
Dr. Burney, lately the theological teacher of the 
Cumberland Presbyterian Church, in a recent work, 
which, as we hear, his General Assembly fail to 
disclaim ; so teach multitudes of pulpit leaders in 
nearly all the Protestant denominations. The cus- 
tomary tone of secular literature is marked by a 
fiery and disdainful rejection of the whole concept. 
And these writers think that nobody can believe it 
except stupid old fogies besotted in their bigotry. 
If Presbyterian pastors will probe the opinions of 
their own people they will find numbers of com- 
municants who regard themselves as more culti- 
vated and intellectual, discarding penal imputation 
as an insult to their moral intuitions. These facts 
show that an exhaustive and triumphant refutation 



Definitions and Statement of the Issue. 19 

of objections and a final establishment of this vital 
doctrine are among the urgent needs of the day. 
If the innovators would but study the masterly 
demonstrations of the church theologians, of an 
Anselm, a Calvin, a Turretin, a "Witsius, a Hill, a 
Hodge, a Shedd, they would not need further dis- 
cussion. But the flippant and superficial spirit 
of our age disdains a thorough study of these 
masters; they are filliped aside by the words "an- 
tiquated," " Calvinistic," 



CHAPTER III. 
(Objections (Examined 

1. HTT is objected that the unrighteousness of 
I penal substitution is strongly shown by the 
fact that God expressly prohibited it to human 
magistrates (Deut. xxiv. 16), and that in Ezekiel 
xviii. 4, he disclaims it as a principle of his own 
moral government, declaring that "the soul that 
sinneth, it shall die." The first assertion is correct ; 
the second misconceives the text. But the sophism 
of the first is contained in the false assumption 
that because a given moral prerogative is improper 
for men, it must, therefore, be improper for God. 
I shall not take the harsh position that because 
God is sovereign and omnipotent, therefore his will 
is not regulated by, or responsible to, those funda- 
mental principles of morality which he has enjoined 
on his creatures. I shall never argue that God's 
"might makes his right," as our opponents charge 
strict Calvinists with arguing. But it is a very 
different thing, and a perfectly plain and reasonable 
thing, to say that the infinite sovereignty, wisdom, 
and holiness of God may condition, and may limit 
his moral rights in a manner very different from 
what is proper for us men. The principles of right- 

20 



Objections Examined. 21 

eousness for the two rulers, God and a human 
magistrate, are the same ; the details of prerogative 
for the two may differ greatly, while directed by 
the same holy principles. How simple is this! 
How ready and facile the instances! Thus, a 
father entrusts his boy to a distant teacher, and 
tells him to consider himself as in loco parentis to 
the urchin. Does this authorize the pedagogue to 
inflict any kind of punishment for the boy's faults 
which would be righteous for the father, as, for in- 
stance, disinheritance ? By no means. This plain 
view makes the inference of our opponents worth- 
less, that because God has told his servants they 
must not do a certain thing, therefore it is immoral 
for him to do it. 

And the reasons limiting the two cases differently 
are plain and strong. The first is: " Vengeance is 
mine ; I will repay, saith the Lord." The preroga- 
tive of retribution is God's alone ; magistrates only 
possess a small fraction of it by delegation from 
him. Hence, they are properly bound by such 
restrictions as he chooses to impose upon their 
judicial functions. Next, men lack the wisdom and 
infinite serenity of moral judgment which are requi- 
site for these exalted and far-reaching acts of retri- 
bution. Third, they cannot possibly find subjects 
suitable for holy penal substitution. One of the 
conditions necessary for righteous substitution is 
the free consent of the substitute, that is, where he 



22 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

himself is innocent. No human being is thus inno- 
cent before God, but each is guilty for himself. 
Now, a guilty life forfeited to the law cannot pos- 
sibly buy off another guilty life also forfeited to 
law. One bankrupt cannot release the obligations 
of another bankrupt by becoming surety for him. 
The surety must personally be innocent, righteous, 
and owing nothing for himself to penal law. This 
principle governed in the establishment of the 
representative relation between both Adam and 
Christ and their two federal bodies. Adam was 
personally innocent when thus chosen, and must 
have continued so in order to benefit his federal 
body; and Christ was and continued absolutely 
innocent, and was thus able to justify his federal 
body by his imputed merit. Here, then, is one in- 
superable obstacle to any human ruler's punishing 
through a substitute. Not to dwell upon this diffi- 
culty, that a good man would rarely be found willing 
to die under human law for a wicked neighbor, we 
meet another still more fatal. No subject of human 
government has that ownership or autocracy of his 
own faculties and being which are strictly neces- 
sary for a penal substitution ; these belong to his 
maker ; they are but a loan to the creature. Now, 
no citizen, however generous, can pay his neigh- 
bor's debt with propriety, nor his own, by robbing 
another in order to get the wherewithal. Besides 
this, every man in society owes moral obligations 



Objections Examined. 23 

to other fellow-creatures who have a rightful in- 
terest in his being and faculties. Let us suppose 
that a good Damon were found generous enough 
to propose dying for a bad Pythias ; Damon's wife 
would very certainly protest, saying, may it please 
the court, I have a legal right to object utterly to 
that arrangement ; for our matrimonial contract has 
invested me with a previous right in Damon's life 
and faculties, for the protection and subsistence of 
me and my children. If the judge knew anything 
of law, he would be obliged to reply, that the wife 
was right ; that Damon, however generous, had no 
right to dispose of his life in this substitution, and 
that the court could not accept his proposal, being 
clothed with only a limited and delegated power, 
and strictly forbidden by the sovereign to accept 
such an arrangement. Another obstacle would 
arise ; the civil magistrate has no power to convert 
Pythias from the evil of his way. And as he is 
equally unable to raise Damon from death, the 
practical results of the substitution would only be 
to deprive society of a good citizen in order to pre- 
serve for it one who had been wicked and mis- 
chievous, and who would, probably, continue so. 
When we add to this that the human judge might 
wickedly pervert the power of substitution to wreak 
his malice upon some innocent person, or to gratify 
a general rage for slaughter, we have the true 
reason which prompted God to prohibit the power 



24 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

summarily to the magistrate. But how worthless 
is the inference that he will never exercise it him- 
self under conditions which he knows to be wise, 
just, and beneficial? 

Now, we find every condition which was lacking 
to the human substitute beautifully fulfilled in the 
case of Christ. He was innocent, owing for him- 
self no debt of guilt. He gave his own free con- 
sent, a consent which his Godhead and autocracy 
of his own being entitled him to give or to withhold. 
(See John x. 17, 18.) He could not be holden by 
death; but, after paying the penal debt of the 
world, he resumed a life more glorious, happy, and 
beneficent than before. He has power to work, 
and does work, true repentance and sanctity in 
every transgressor whom he justifies. The found- 
ing of this objection upon the inhibition of Deuter- 
onomy xxiv. 16 well illustrates the superficial haste 
and silliness of our opponents. Had they read a 
few chapters further, they would have found (in 
Joshua vii. 6-26) what absolutely refutes their in- 
ference. They say that, because the civil magis- 
trate may not make any penal substitution, there- 
fore God himself cannot. But in the latter place, 
in the case of the thief Achan and his children, God 
did this very thing. The sinning children were 
punished along with the guilty father. This sen- 
tence was not found by Joshua, the human chief 
magistrate of Israel, but was dictated to him by 



Objections Examined. 25 

Jehovah. This case utterly ruins the objectors. 
The Almighty took it out of Joshua's hands, as it 
was one of critical importance, and judged it him- 
self in his own sovereignty. But what shall we 
say of the audacity of our opponents' assertion, 
when we find the same God asserting his purpose 
to visit the guilt of sinful parents on sinful chil- 
dren in the very Decalogue (Exod. xx. 5), a law of 
perpetual obligation for all ages and dispensations, 
and in his own most solemn declaration of his own 
principles to Moses (Exod. xxxiv. 7)? And what 
shall we say when we all have before our eyes in- 
disputable instances in God's providence of the 
penal results incurred by parents descending to 
children, while those children may be exempt from 
their particular vices? And, last, what shall we 
say when we hear the meek and lowly Jesus de- 
claring with such emphasis (Luke xi. 51, 52) that 
this law of imputation was still in full force under 
the Christian dispensation, and was to be terribly 
executed upon that generation of Jews? But does 
Ezekiel (xviii. 4) contradict both Moses and Christ 
as to this principle ? If he does, the squarely hon- 
est mind has no resort except to give up the in- 
spiration of Ezekiel. He who has a fair under- 
standing of God's theocratic covenant with Israel 
and of its history has no difficulty at all. Ezekiel 
heard the captive Jewish nobles in Chaldea inso- 
lently perverting truth by wresting the old adage ; 



26 Christ Our Penal Substitute. 

it was "the fathers who ate the sour grapes, but it 
is the children's teeth which are set on edge." This 
is the clear line of the debate between the pastor 
and his backslidden charge : Ezekiel — Your pre- 
sent, urgent duty is repentance. Jews — "Why so, 
Ezekiel? Ezekiel — Because you are great sinners. 
Jews — What evidence have you, Ezekiel, that we 
are great sinners ? Ezekiel — The proof is the great 
secular calamities that you are now suffering : cap- 
tivity, exile, and pagan despotism. Jews — This 
proof is not conclusive, because it may be that we 
are only suffering the inherited guilt of our fathers' 
great sins. Now, it is to meet this evasion that 
Ezekiel introduces, with powerful emphasis, the 
correct statement of the theocratic covenant be- 
tween God and Israel. It was precisely this : that 
God was to hold to his chosen people the relation 
of a political king. This was to be to Israel a 
great mark of favor, grace, and blessing, chiefly in 
that the strict principle of God's government over 
pagan peoples, by which God visits the guilt of 
parents also in part upon their guilty children, was 
by this covenant suspended as to Israel, in special 
mercy; just as, in the covenant of grace with be- 
lieving sinners of all races and ages, these are to 
be delivered from all guilt, imputed or personal, 
when they receive Christ, and by his gracious 
merits and intercession. 

The political compact between God and Israel 



Objections Examined. 27 

was this: that he would chastise political trans- 
gressions with secular calamities, but that the 
favored people should be exempt from the fathers' 
imputed guilt, and from that awful substitution 
under which God is still governing all pagan and 
wicked races. Whence it would follow, that just 
as soon as a generation of Hebrews, suffering for 
their sins, should turn from them by repentance, 
God would promptly lift off their secular miseries. 
This was the special bargain between God and the 
Hebrews. Moses explained it thus to them in de- 
tail at the end of his ministry. (See Deuteronomy, 
last chapters.) This compact finds illustration 
throughout the Book of Judges (chapter iii. 9, 
15, et passim), and the prophets. Here is just 
the explanation of a very remarkable fact in his- 
tory, that for two thousand five hundred years this 
little commonwealth of Hebrews escaped that doom 
which befell all pagan commonwealths. The po- 
litical and religious trangressions of Israel doubt- 
less often became, if not as gross, at least as aggra- 
vated as those of any pagan race of Mizraim or 
Amalek. But these people were all destroyed as 
nations by God's providence in punishment of 
their race transgressions. Where is Mizraim ? 
Where is Amalek? Where are the Amorite com- 
monwealths, and the Hittite s and Eclom ? Where 
is Assyria, Chaldea, Tyre, Elam, Carthage? These 
have ceased forever to have any distinct racial or 



28 Christ our Penal Surstitute. 

political existence. The political life of Israel per- 
sisted through all his crimes and calamities because 
he was under the special covenant. Among Israel- 
ites, therefore, the old adage could not be true as 
to political guilt. Therefore, EzekieFs argument 
against his backslidden charge was logically and 
historically perfect. The heavy woes of that gene- 
ration did prove them backslidden sinners, and, 
therefore, repentance and reformation were their 
prime duty. True, Ezekiel then proceeds to do 
what all the prophets delight in doing, he proceeds 
to deduce from the terms of God's theocratic secu- 
lar covenant with Israel as a type, the blessed 
spiritual reality of which it was the standing em- 
blem, the merciful rule of Messiah's gospel king- 
dom over believing men of all races, that all peni- 
itent and obedient souls are by that gospel mercy 
released eternally from all guilt, whether original 
and imputed, or personal. He says under Mes- 
siah's spiritual kingdom no soul incurs eternal 
death save by his own personal impenitence. Each 
soul which perishes is the architect of its own ruin. 
There is, therefore, no suggestion in this famous 
passage of any disclaimer or repeal of God's prov- 
idential law of vicarious secular punishments upon 
Gentile families and tribes. 

Now, let us see just what the extent of that law 
is. God never said that the guilt of wicked par- 
ents could be justly visited upon an innocent de- 



Objections Examined. 29 

scendant, nor that the rights of perfect immunity 
secured by such perfect innocence could ever be 
invaded, even by the Almighty Sovereign, without 
the voluntary consent of the substitute. If Adam 
ever had another son as truly pure as Jesus, the 
son of Mary, I know, as surely as I know that God 
is God, that holy son never tasted any punishment, 
either in this world or the next, for the guilt of the 
wicked ancestor ; and the only reason why the son 
of Mary was an exception was this, that his supe- 
rior nature was uncreated, independent, and divine ; 
that this eternal Word clothed himself with human- 
ity for the very purpose of bearing this peculiar 
substitution, and that in the God-man, Christ, 
both natures and both wills, the human and di- 
vine, consented with perfect freedom to this won- 
drous arrangement for the glory of God's moral 
perfections and for the infinite good of an innu- 
merable company of redeemed men. As to the 
guilty posterity of guilty parents, these are the 
principles taught by enlightened conscience and 
God's word : That the sovereign Judge may right- 
eously punish any guilty person with adequate suf- 
ferings, both secular and eternal, after the death of 
the body ; that the wicked children of wicked par- 
ents do primarily incur this personal responsibility 
by their own sins; that having thus made them- 
selves guilty of death, they are justly liable to be 
punished in any times and modes, not excessive, 



30 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

which seem wisest and best to the Omniscient ; and 
that God does see fit, for wise and righteous ad- 
ministrative reasons, to put upon these wicked 
children a part of the earthly sufferings entailed 
upon them as natural results of parental sins; and 
this is the extent of that providential law published 
by God in both Testaments, and administered be- 
fore our eyes in every generation. 

I now beg the reader to pause and ask himself 
this question, whether any other moral dispensa- 
tion would be possible towards responsible moral 
agents, connected with each other by racial, par- 
ental, and social ties, as we men are; towards 
creatures whose existence is begun through parent- 
age, qualified by heredity, and closely bound up in 
social relations which, whatever responsibilities 
they may bring, are absolutely essential to man's 
rational development and welfare ? I can see how 
the young of the human species could be exempted 
from this principle of imputation, provided God 
conditioned their existence and growth like those 
of young monkeys or pigs, namely, without any 
inheritance of property rights ; without any moral 
or intellectual influences, forming their spiritual 
natures for better or for worse; without any per- 
manent parental or filial affection; without any 
spiritual heredity ; without any such attributes . or 
social relation as unite rational men ; not otherwise. 
But since man must be the opposite of all these in 



Objections Examined. 31 

order to be better than a monkey or a pig, I see 
not how the principle of social imputation could 
be eliminated. Let us see some human infidel 
perfectionists construct a rational and moral social 
state without it. 

To save time and space we have completed the 
argument by analogy from this providential impu- 
tation of the guilt of sinful parents to sinful chil- 
dren, to the imputation of the guilt of sinners unto 
their divine Substitute and Eedeemer. We do not 
claim that the parallel is complete in all its details. 
It is enough that in both instances we have the 
principle of imputation, although its applications 
are conditioned differently in some particulars. 
And this is all that is required to rebut the objec- 
tion that the very principle is itself so irrational 
and contra- ethical, that a wise and holy God can- 
not have adopted it all. For he does adopt it to a 
certain extent in a multitude of cases which are 
continually occurring before our eyes. We must 
stultify ourselves in order to avoid admitting the 
facts that sinful children do share the penal conse- 
quences of their father's sins. Bishop Butler well 
remarks that the argument from these cases to the 
propriety of the redemptive imputation to Christ is 
a fortiori, whether or not we may apprehend all 
of God's thoughts and purposes in the two cases. 
For if this imputation of the parents' punishment 
to their sinning children is justifiable, though 



32 Christ odr Penal Substitute. 

made without asking the children's consent, the 
imputation of our sins to Christ must be more 
justifiable, seeing it is only made after Christ's free 
consent. From this reasoning there is absolutely 
no evasion except by denying God's providence 
totally in any of the natural calamities which 
follow men's sins, or by denying that such calami- 
ties are penal or have any moral significance of 
God's displeasure with men's sins. As I have 
pointed out, the former denial is practical athe- 
ism ; and the latter utterly obliterates all evidence 
from natural theology whether God (if there is any 
God) possesses any moral attributes or exercises 
any moral regimen over his rational creatures. 
Such is the deadly abyss to which this rational- 
istic line of thought will lead, if it be consistently 
followed. 

The second class of objections is thus stated: 
That this usage of penal substitution is of pagan 
origin, and is prompted by a barbaric vengeance 
and hatred, not by sentiments of justice; that the 
proof is, as Christianity and civilization have edu- 
cated the nations of Christendom, they have abol- 
ished the barbaric usage in all its forms ; and that we 
no longer hear of hostages being put to death, in 
retribution for the breach of treaties, as antipsychoi. 
Of course we do not deny that barbaric races and 
ruthless tyrants have mingled feelings of revenge and 
cruelty with their execution of their ancient laws. 



Objections Examined. 33 

We have already explained in full the sufficient rea- 
sons which make penal substitution improper in the 
retributive actions of civil rulers. But, unfortunately 
for the objectors, their assertions concerning the 
usages of modern Christian civilized nations are 
expressly erroneous. There is not one of them 
that does not retain and employ the principle of 
penal imputation in certain cases. A common and 
familiar instance is the law which compels sureties 
to pay the debts of insolvent debtors and of delin- 
quent officials. We have already used the in- 
stances to illustrate the distinction between the 
guilt, reatus, or obligation to penalty, and the per- 
sonal attribute of badness or evilness qualifying 
the evil agent, and expressed in his sin. We grant 
that the surety's motive in joining the bond, now 
forfeited, may have been generous and honorable. 
We do not impute to him any shade of the mean- 
ness of character exhibited by the delinquent 
debtor. Yet we judge that this surety is right- 
eously held to make good that debtor's obligation, 
inasmuch as he voluntarily assumed it. There is 
not a sane man upon earth who thinks such cases 
of imputation unjust. But it is replied that the 
obligation thus enforced by imputation is not eth- 
ical, but merely pecuniary ; that the principal was 
bound only to the payment of so much money, 
and that the thing exacted from his surety by im- 
putation is only money and not punishment. This 



34 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

evasion is false in both statements. The debtor's 
broken contract to pay money for value received 
was both moral and pecuniary. Its breach was an 
immorality, except where necessitated by some 
dispensation of Providence. The common law of 
England was founded upon this judgment, that the 
breach of contract was a moral delinquency, a mis- 
demeanor, punishable by imprisonment at the will 
of the injured creditor, until atoned for by full re- 
paration. This form of penalty was harsh, but the 
judgment which grounded it is just. And our laws 
still hold that there is criminality in all debts aris- 
ing out of official embezzlement and the obtaining 
of money under false pretences; yea, criminality 
amounting to felony. It is equally untrue that the 
enforcement of the debt against the surety involves 
no punishment. It is to him an infliction of suffer- 
ing, as practically a fine or mulct as any imposed 
by a criminal court in punishment of a misde- 
meanor. It is often a ruinous fine, inflicting upon 
the surety the miseries of lifelong destitution. 

Still another instance cf penal imputation is 
found in the law of reprisal; and this is still as- 
serted by all Christian nations. One common- 
wealth commits sin by breaking its treaty- obliga- 
tions to another. Thereupon the injured common- 
wealth seeks retribution by issuing letters of 
marque and reprisal against the property of any 
citizen of the sinning commonwealth found upon 



Objections Examined. 35 

the high seas. Let the aggressive commonwealth 
have a representative government; let the citizen 
whose goods are seized upon the sea for reprisal 
plead that he voted against the aggressive actions 
of his own commonwealth, and, therefore, is not 
morally and personally responsible therefor ; there 
is not an admiralty court in Christendom which would 
yield to this plea. This merchant must bear his part 
of the retribution due to his sinning commonwealth, 
because he is a member of it. The military laws 
of every civilized nation provide for cases of penal 
imputation, and of none is this more true, both in 
theory and practice, than of those of the United 
States. Let an officer who has surrendered in 
battle or by capitulation be slain by the enemy 
while an unresisting prisoner of war, then a cap- 
tive officer of equal rank among the enemies will 
be condemned and shot, although, personally, he 
had never broken any rule of civilized warfare, or, 
perhaps, had never yet drawn his weapon against 
any adversary. 

In view of these legalized usages, it is a mere con- 
tention of ignorance or reckless assertion for an 
opponent to say that these penal substitutions are 
antiquated and barbaric. These laws are in full 
force to-day ; and they no more offend the moral 
sentiments of civilized men than they did those of 
the ancients. What mere insolence is it, then, in 
these rationalists to claim that man's primary and 



36 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

necessary moral intentions condemn all penal sub- 
stitution, when we see that nearly all men of all 
races, religions and civilizations justify it in some 
cases. The valid tests of such an intuition are 
these : "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omni- 
bus, creditor" These different legalized instances 
of imputation may be conditioned by circumstances 
differing from each other and different from those 
which condition the imputation of our guilt to 
Christ. But there is the principle. And my point 
is, that it is a principle recognized and employed 
as just by all nations in all ages. This may not be 
enough to prove it right ; for in some cases nearly 
the whole world has gone wrong. But it is a com- 
plete answer to the historical assumption, and to 
the false inference drawn from it. 

A sophistical appeal is made by our opponents 
to men's moral intuitions in another form. They 
ask : would not all spectators feel outraged if they 
now saw a court punish an innocent man, upon 
some fiction of imputation, in place of the guilty 
one? And they exclaim, was the innocent victim 
one of these Calvinists, they presume none of his 
theologies would reconcile him to the burning 
wrong by their antiquated logic. Our reply is: 
that their intuitions would condemn the injustice, 
provided the imputations were made without their 
free consent. In the case of Christ this was given. 
That is the all-important point. Common sense 



Objections Examined. 87 

affirms that when reasonable spectators were in- 
formed of the substitute's free assent, this would 
be the verdict of their intuition : lie cannot com- 
plain, for he gets what he freely chose to bargain 
for. 

The other and more philosophic objections will 
be dealt with under the appropriate heads of our 
argument. 



CHAPTER IV. 
(Cfye Utilitarian O]eory of punishments, 

OUR opponents virtually adopt the utilitarian 
ethics, for on it they found a famous objec- 
tion to the gospel doctrine of substitution. They 
proceed thus: God is love. But a ruler whose 
single consummate moral attribute is benovolence 
can punish one of his creatures only from a benevo- 
lent motive. They find this motive in God's desire 
to administer a healing medicine to the spirit of 
the creature whom he loves, which he perceives is 
suffering from the disease of sin ; and also the 
benevolent desire to deter the other thoughtless 
creatures from sinning. They suppose that God 
in his punitive providence regards sin only as a 
natural mischief, injurious to the welfare of crea- 
tures, and not a moral evil incurring his righteous 
displeasure, and carrying an inherent ill-desert. 
They suppose that the sentiment of the loving God in 
view of sin is only compassion, and not moral resent- 
ment, just like the feeling of the good, kind mother 
towards the sickness of her amiable child. This 
mother, prompted by love alone and prudential ex- 
pediency, imposes restraints upon the sick child 
quite irksome to it, and administers remedies which 

38 



The Utilitarian Theory of Punishments. 39 

afflict the sufferer witli additional nausea, gripings, 
and burning pains. But in all the treatment, there 
is nothing vindicatory; her sole object is to deliver 
the child from the greater miseries resulting from 
unremedied disease. Exactly such, say they, is 
God's punitive policy toward sinners; it is only 
to be explained as remedial. And on this theory 
of punishment they found a famous objection 
against penal substitution. The sick child must 
swallow his own physic himself. It will be no 
remedy for him to have it swallowed by a healthy 
comrade. So, the punishment of a substitute is 
utterly futile for any medicinal result, and, there- 
fore, foolish and cruel. The shallowness of this 
boasted argument is revealed by a simple question : 
Do not our opponents claim for Christ's sufferings 
great medicinal or remedial effects ? 

And according to them, were not the sufferings 
borne by one person, Jesus, and the benefits re- 
ceived by others, converted sinners? Here, then, 
we have the same case which they pronounce 
absurd : the healthy person drinking the medicine, 
and the sick persons healed by it without tasting it. 
But this explanation of God's punishments is noto- 
riously that of the utilitarian ethics. The famous 
book of Dr. Wm. Paley, his Moral and Political 
Philosophy, with those of Hobbes, Locke, Helve- 
tius, Hume and other advocates of the ''Selfish 
System," once gave currency to the ethics of ex- 



40 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

pecliency in New England. To all sound philoso- 
phers, that sorry system is dead, slain by the un- 
answerable logic of Bishop Butler, Dr. Kichard 
Price, Cousin, Jouffroy, Kant, and indeed, a great 
host in America, Britain, France and Germany. 1 
This theory of punishments is an integral part of 
that utilitarian system of ethics ; since the parent 
stock is dead, this branch must be but rubbish, fit 
only to be burned. The recital of the general re- 
futation would lead too far away from our special 
object in this discussion. Such refutation ought 
to be needless for well-informed men. For the 
demolition of this remedial theory of punishments, 
these remarks are sufficient. 

We were about to say that it finds no support in 
the Holy Scriptures; but we remember that this 
old book may carry little authority with our op- 
ponents. While the Scripture often describes God 
as administering medicinal chastisement to his 
reconciled children for their good, it nowhere as- 
cribes to him such a motive for his retributions 
upon the condemned and reprobate. His objects 
here are always different, the satisfaction of his 
own moral indignation, the meetings of the claims 
of justice, the vindication of his law. 

In order to hold this remedial theory we must 
adopt very degrading views of God's omniscience, 

1 The reader may see an exhaustive refutation of it in my 
recent work, The Practical Philosophy. 



The Utilitarian Theory of Punishments. 41 

not to say of his sagacity ; and we must conclude 
that as a moral governor he is very much a failure 
(ahsit blaspheinia) ! For even our creature experi- 
ence has shown us that the temporal miseries 
visited upon sin by divine providence mostly fail 
to reform sinners. The prodigal usually goes on, 
in spite of the evils of poverty, to repeat his sins of 
waste and idleness. The drunkard experiences 
the miseries of disease, but returns again to his 
strong drink. The miseries of pagan life are more 
severe than those experienced in Christian lands, 
and they are mostly traceable to their idolatries ; 
but we do not see that they convert any pagans. 
In truth, whenever we see instances of sanctified 
affliction, that is to say, of the temporal penalties 
of sin reforming the sinners, the good result is ac- 
counted for, not by the operation of the mere pain, 
but of the word and Spirit of God, employing it as 
a timely occasion for the sanctifying impressions. 
If God is infinitely knowing and wise, does not he 
also see this? If he is infinitely benevolent, why 
does he continue to employ this pretended reme- 
dial policy when he sees it futile, and therefore 
cruel? It may be added that if this theory of 
remedial penalties is relied on to justify the crimi- 
nal laws of states, then it shows their punitive poli- 
cies to be wretched and contemptible failures. 
What felon repents in a Penitentiarium f We de- 
mand, then, of our rationalistic and humanitarian 



42 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

opponents, why they permit their boasted com- 
monwealths to continue civil punishments if they 
believe that penalty can only be justified as a be- 
nevolent remedy for transgressions? 

But a more fatal objection is found in every case 
of those moral creatures of God who are punished, 
but not for their restoration. If there is any au- 
thority in the Bible, it makes known to us two very 
numerous classes of such culprits, reprobate men 
and the fallen and condemned angels. Their pun- 
ishment cannot be designed to be remedial ; because 
for them there is to be no remedy, but perdition. 
Of course, therefore, God does not design the penal 
sufferings of these creatures as benevolent; they 
simply are retributive, or they are inexplicable. 

This theory is utterly inapplicable to an infinite 
heavenly Father. Human parents seek to cure the 
diseases of their children by using distressing re- 
medies. They know that their remedies are as 
real natural evils as the disease itself, although 
smaller and briefer evils. They know that their 
curative policy is, after all, " a choice of evils." 
Why do they not employ some relief for their be- 
loved children which is no evil at all? Because 
they cannot help themselves ; their knowledge and 
power are quite limited. Were they omnipotent 
their love would surely cause them to prefer an- 
other remedy. They would complete the curative 
work upon those they love by their simple word 



The Utilitarian Theory of Punishments. 43 

of power : " Be healed ! " But the heavenly Father 
is sovereign, and infinite in wisdom and power. 
If benevolence were his sole motive in punishing, 
why did he not choose some other painless re- 
medy? When we add that, being omniscient, he 
must have foreseen the complete failure of the dis- 
tressing remedy in multitudes of sufferers, and 
that, being almighty, he must have felt himself able 
to use any other remedy he chose, equally painless 
and potent, our question becomes crushing. The 
theory of the remedial policy, as applied to God's 
government, stands exposed as equally shallow, 
thoughtless, and worthless. 

It breaks down equally when tested in another 
way. If the ruler's motive in punishing were only 
remedial and deterrent, without any eye to retribu- 
tive justice, then every consideration should decide 
him to punish where the punishment would be 
most effective for these ends. Upon this plan many 
cases would arise in which it would be more poli- 
tic, and therefore more just, to punish some inno- 
cent person, without his consent, closely connected 
with the real culprit whose reform is designed. 
For instance, here is a fallen reprobate woman, 
guilty of frequent disorders, and several times 
chastised for them by law. But she has become so 
callous and desperate that the legal penalties fail 
to influence her. In this arid heart there is yet 
one green spot ; she still has one daughter, the 



44 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

child of her better days, who is innocent and charm- 
ing. The mother still loves this child with all the 
passion which centres upon a sole remaining ob- 
ject. The magistrate punishes this child with 
stripes. As the hardened mother witnesses her 
torments and her screams, she relents; she re- 
solves to reform, and her mother love keeps her 
to her resolution. Do we therefore say that it was 
more wise and just to scourge the innocent child 
than the guilty mother? This is abhorrent to 
every right mind. But according to the theory we 
combat, it should be entirely acceptable to our 
consciences. 



CHAPTER V. 
Ketribution not Hepenge. 

BUT our opponents may now exclaim, that, by 
proving that God's motive in his punishments 
is not merely remedial but retributive, we only suc- 
ceed in making him out a vindictive person, and 
therefore abhorrent, instead of an object of reve- 
rence to right minds. They say that vindicatory 
punishments are mere revenge, and revenge is sin- 
ful and odious. They assert that the concept of 
retributive sufferings, inflicted merely to satisfy 
moral resentment, is barbaric. Savage and bar- 
barous rulers thought this right, and under the name 
of justice remorselessly indulged their spite and 
malice against their enemies. And our opponents 
claim that, as the light of Christian civilization 
spreads, this cruel notion is corrected. We uiust 
therefore ascertain and settle the truth as to this 
sentiment of vindicatory justice, as it is ascribed 
to good men, and especially to the Divine Ruler. Is 
the desire for simple retribution upon guilt mali- 
cious revenge, or is it grounded in a reasonable and 
necessary moral judgment ? Is this intrinsic de- 
sert of suffering in the sinful agent the counter- 
part to that intrinsic title to welfare as due to 
virtuous agents, upon which our opponents insist 

45 



46 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

most strenously? And is this the simple and pri- 
mary aim of the wise and righteous Ruler in pun- 
ishing to requite the ill-desert of the guilty man ? 
We assert the latter set of propositions. We do 
not disclaim for the Divine Ruler all remedial pol- 
icy, nor all benevolent motive in the sufferings 
which he visits upon sin. Doubtless, among the 
manifold purposes of his wisdom, he does aim to 
recall transgressors from their sins, and, even in his 
sterner acts of retributive justice, he has an eye to 
deterring other men from sin by the spectacle of 
its woeful consequences. But behind and under- 
neath all these legitimate and benevolent policies 
is God's fundamental judgment, that sin is to be 
punished because it deserves to be, because im- 
partial justice requires due penalty, just as it de- 
mands reward for virtue. 

The position is proved by conclusive facts in the 
consciousness of all men. Their moral intuition 
recognizes ill desert as an essential element in evil 
action. Desert of what? Moral ill-desert is but 
desert of natural ill. It is an immediate judg- 
ment of the reason that voluntary sin deserves 
penal suffering, Ask any unsophisticated mind 
why a given penalty is proper, and it will reply, 
simply because the sinner deserves it. Every 
person, whether sympathetic and benevolent or 
harsh and revengeful, when shocked by a crime, 
feels an instinctive desire that it may receive due 



Ketkibutton not Bevenge. 47 

retribution. These all think that this is not re- 
venge, but a sentiment of justice. If the criminal 
escapes judgment, they say that the "gallows has 
been cheated." So opposite are the two senti- 
ments of retributive justice and revenge, the most 
compassionate, pure, sympathetic women and in- 
genuous youths feel this sentiment of justice most 
keenly, while they would shrink with the greatest 
reluctance from being obliged to witness the pangs 
of the wicked. The most righteous and amiable 
magistrate is at once the most certain to pronounce 
the righteous judgment against crime, and the most 
tender and sad in doing it. Such judges are not 
seldom seen to assert the inexorable claims of the 
law with tears coming down their faces. 

The same position is proved by those principles 
which direct our penal administration. Not only 
do legislators and lawyers, but all the people, see 
these principles to be self-evident. For instance, 
let us suppose that counsel for a murderer, after a 
just verdict of death rendered, and after admitting 
that there were no adequate mitigating circum- 
stances, should move the judge to set aside the 
verdict simply because the fear and anguish of the 
condemned man were pitiable. Any righteous 
judge, learned in the law, would reply that such a 
motion was entirely improper; that it was tanta- 
mount to requiring him to perpetrate injustice and 
to become a traitor to the state and to his own 



48 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

official oatli ; and if the counsel grew pertinacious 
in his claim, he would risk being punished for con- 
tempt. Or if the repentance of the condemned 
man were urged as the ground for setting aside a 
just verdict, the judge would explain that while 
this was, of course, the proper feeling for the 
criminal, it constituted no satisfaction whatever for 
the penal debt, no just recompense for guilt. The 
due punishment alone must pay that debt of justice. 
Or let this plea be urged that this murderer had 
slain but one man, and had always been a harm- 
less person before, and would certainly become so 
in future. The judge would say this was nothing 
to the purpose; that because this peaceful life 
only satisfied the just demands of the law, it could 
not be offered as payment for guilt of the murder ; 
for this the only compensation was the due and 
just punishment. We here see that human law 
does not believe the medicinal or remedial effect 
of penalty to be its main end ; because it proceeds 
to exact the punishment just the same whether there 
is or is not any evidence that the criminal is cured 
of his moral disease by his own penitence and 
reformation. 

We introduce a still more conclusive argument. 
Sin is the antithesis of virtue. That moral princi- 
ple in the reason which makes us desire the reward 
of righteousness is one and the same with that 
which makes us crave the due punishment of 



Ketribution not Betenge. 49 

wickedness; moral approval of virtue and moral 
indignation against evil are not effluences of two 
principles in the reason, but of one only. They 
are differentiated solely by the opposition of the 
two contrasted objects. The sincere approbation 
of the good necessitates moral indignation against 
the evil, because the objects of the two sentiments 
are opposites. Everybody thinks thus. Nobody 
would believe that man to be capable of sincere 
moral admiration for good actions who should 
declare himself incapable of moral resentment 
towards vile conduct. Now, then, if we would 
have a God without moral indignation against sin, 
we must have one without any moral pleasure in 
righteousness. If we must have a God capable of 
disregarding and violating the essential tie between 
sin and its penalty, we must have him equally 
capable of disregarding the righteous tie between 
meritorious obedience and reward. How would 
our opponents like that result? They are the very 
men who hold that the good man's title to heaven 
is grounded on this inviolable bond which, in the 
judgment of the good God, unites righteousness 
and reward. Tf we were to say that God is capable 
of capriciously rending that bond, they would fill 
the very heavens with their outcry against the 
injustice and even blasphemy of such a doctrine. 
Yet these are the men who insist that God may 
capriciously rend the exactly parallel bond between 



50 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

guilt and deserved penalty. The magnetic needle 
presents an illustration exactly. When the little 
bar of steel is charged with this electric energy its 
upper end invariably seeks the north pole, and as 
invariably is repelled from the south pole of the 
earth. They are not two opposite energies in the 
north pole of this needle, but one only ; it is the 
same magnetism which causes the north pole to 
attract and the south pole to repel its upper end, 
because the magnetic conditions of the earth's two 
poles are opposite. What should we think of the 
mariner who should tell us that he had so marvel- 
lous a needle that its upper end was always and 
certainly attracted to the north pole, yet not 
repelled from the south pole? We would know 
that he was either ignorant or a liar. 

Now, we must believe that God's righteousness 
is the same in its essential principles with that 
which he requires of us, and this by two reasons, 
as even the pagan poet knew, "We are God's 
offspring." He formed our spirits in his own image 
and likeness. Again, God is the moral governor of 
mankind. If the righteousness which he requires 
of us were not the same in principle with his own, 
ruler and ruled could not understand each other. 
But Scripture expressly confirms our position here. 
As Proverbs xvii. 15, " He that justifieth the wicked, 
and he that condemneth the just, even they both are 
abomination to the Lord." Romans ii. 9-11, "God 



Retribution not Revenge. 51 

will render indignation and wrath, tribulation and 
anguish, upon every soul that doeth evil. ... 
But glory, honor and peace to every man that 
seeketh good. . . . For there is no respect of 
persons with God." 2 Thessalonians i. 6, 7, " See- 
ing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense 
tribulation to them that trouble you; and to you 
who are troubled rest with us." In each of these 
scriptures, and in many others of similar import, 
the retribution of guilt is declared to be the exhi- 
bition of the same righteousness (not revenge), with 
the reward of merit. 

Again, the Scriptures ascribe retributive justice 
to God as his essential attribute, not an optional 
exercise of his physical power. He is declared to 
be perfectly righteous, and righteousness in a ruler 
is defined as the principle which gives to every one 
his due with unvarying impartiality. ''Justice and 
judgment are the habitation of thy throne." " Thou 
art of purer eyes than to behold evil." "He hateth 
all workers of iniquity." In Ezekiel xviii., he tri- 
umphantly asks the sinful Jews : "Are not my ways 
equal, saifch the Lord ? (impartial); are not your ways 
unequal ? " He then proceeds to explain this im- 
partiality with the utmost precision, as the expres- 
sion of that impartiality both in punishing the back- 
sliders and pardoning the penitent. If distributive 
righteousness is an essential attribute in God, then 
his immutability necessitates its impartial and uni- 



52 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

versal application to both classes of sinners. The 
declarative holiness of God necessitates the same 
regularity. The proper expression of that holiness 
is the divine action, rather than the divine words. 
If God rewarded guilt with immunity and wel- 
fare, in as many cases as he thus rewards merit, 
rational creatures could see no evidence at all of 
his holiness. Were he to vacillate only to the ex- 
tent of rewarding guilt with welfare in the minority 
of cases, to that extent he would impair this mani- 
festation of his holiness. The attribute of truth is 
surely perfect and essential in God. But this also 
insures the invariable exercise of his punitive jus- 
tice, for he has not only said, but sworn, that " the 
wicked shall not go unpunished." 

But the Scriptures come still nearer to the issue 
in debate. They declare expressly in many places 
that in God's administration sin is unpardonable 
until satisfaction is made for its guilt. In Numbers 
xxxii. 23, God says by Moses, "Be sure your sin 
will find you out." In Romans i. 18, he declares 
by Paul that " the wrath of God is revealed from 
heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteous- 
ness of men." In two most solemn and emphatic 
places (Exodus xxxiv. 7 ; Nahum i. 3), Jehovah de- 
clares that he will by no means clear the guilty. 
The crowning evidence is in the words of the Re- 
deemer himself, in that very sermon on the Mount, 
which our opponents are so fond of claiming, Mat- 



Ketribution not Kevenge. 53 

thew v. 17, 18, "Think not I am come to destroy 
the law and the prophets ; I am not come to destroy 
but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, until 
heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle of the 
law shall not fail until all be fulfilled." 

The rite of bloody sacrifice, unquestionably or- 
dained for man, the sinner, by God, proves the same 
truth. Until the Lamb of God came and took 
away the guilt of the world, God's requirement of 
bloody sacrifice was invariable. From Abel down 
to Zachariah, the father of John, in order that be- 
lievers might pray, the smoke of the burning vie-* 
tim must ascend from the central altar. The Apos- 
tle Paul has summed up the invariable history in 
the words (Heb. ix. 22), "And without shedding 
of blood is no remission." But this awful rite, 
the death and burning of an innocent and living 
creature, could typify but one truth, substitution. 
Compared with the milder ritual of the new dis- 
pensation, bloody sacrifice was more expensive and 
inconvenient, yet God regularly required it. It is 
manifest that his object was to keep this great 
truth, penal substitution, prominent before the 
minds of sinful men, because, like our opponents, 
they are so prone to forget it. 

But our opponents here advance two cavils 
which they think are very decisive. They cry: 
the best civil magistrates sometimes pardon crime 
without satisfaction, and their moral credit is 



54 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

thereby enhanced with their subjects instead of 
being lowered. Why may it not be all the more 
so with the God of love ? The reply is very sim- 
ple. Because those cases of pardon, in which 
alone human rulers can properly set aside a ver- 
dict without penal satisfaction for guilt, are cases 
which can never possibly occur under God's juris- 
diction. They must fall under one of these heads : 
where either the evidence of guilt has been after- 
wards found inconclusive, or it is uncertain whether 
the condemned man acted with criminal intention, 
or where unforseen circumstances are about to 
change the operation of the sentence of the law 
into something more severe or destructive than 
was justly intended. But these cases arise be- 
cause all human rulers are fallible ; in the adminis- 
tration of an omniscient, infallible God, they never 
can occur. But every wise man knows that these 
are the only cases in which it is safe and right for 
human magistrates to exercise the pardoning 
power. Again, it is objected that this God enjoins 
on us the forgiveness of injuries without retribu- 
tion as at once the loveliest, the most Godlike 
Christian grace. Therefore this dogma must be 
false, which represents God as always unforgiving 
until his vengeance is satisfied. They brandish 
before us the Lord's prayer. They proclaim the 
words of Paul, requiring us to forgive our enemies 
"even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven us." 



Retkibution not Revenge. 55 

Out of their own months we easily refute them. 
For Paul teaches, in this their textus palmarius, 
that God does not forgive his enemies after the 
fashion they claim, but for Christ's sake. Which 
is to say that God's forgiveness of his enemies is 
grounded in Christ's satisfaction for their guilt, 
and it implies that those enemies of God who re- 
ject Christ's satisfaction are not forgiven by God. 
The forgiveness required of us is to be after the 
pattern of God's forgiveness (as he, etc.). Now, 
how does God forgive his enemies? Upon condi- 
tion of repentance and faith ; not otherwise. And 
Christ, in teaching Peter, shows that our forgive- 
ness is not required to go beyond God's. If thy 
brother ''trespass against thee seven times in a 
day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, 
saying, I repent ; thou shalt forgive him." (Luke 
xvii. 4.) But what if the offender says, "I do not 
repent." Christ answers (in another place), don't 
seek revenge, but let him be unto thee as a heathen 
man and a publican. But the weakness and folly 
of this cavil is best revealed by this question : In 
what relation do we stand to our trespassers in this 
forgiveness of injuries? In the relation of fellows, 
equals, sinners toward God like them, and falli- 
ble creatures. In what relation does God stand to 
his trespassers? In that of sovereign owner, and 
also in that of infallible chief-justice and magis- 
trate. That makes all the difference. " Vengeance 



56 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

is mine, saith the Lord." The visiting of due re- 
tribution upon guilt is the exclusive prerogative of 
God ; because his sovereignty, his power, his pur- 
ity, his infallible wisdom and justice qualify him 
for that task. And therefore we who are disquali- 
fied are not to meddle with it. Is it not fatuous 
to infer that because God says we are unfit, and 
therefore must not meddle with his prerogative, 
therefore he must not exercise it himself? Even 
the poorest human magistrate sees this difference 
perfectly. Let us suppose that a thief duly con- 
victed should reason with him to set aside a just 
verdict in this way : "Squire, you are a charitable 
Christian ; last year when I and my family were in 
distress your charity gave me relief. This verdict 
puts us in distress again ; the same charity should 
again release us." We presume the plainest squire 
would know how to say: "Thou fool, then I was 
acting toward thee as a private person and neigh- 
bor. I took what was mine own to succor thy dis- 
tress; now I sit in the judgment seat; I represent 
the delegated rights of the law, of eternal justice 
and of God ; these are not my own to give away in 
charity. I am sacredly sworn to uphold them. 
Would it be charity in me to commit theft and 
perjury to extend succor to you in this present dis- 
tress, where you deserve none? " 

Our opponents are fond of charging that this 
our doctrine of God's distributive justice is harsh, 
barbaric, bloody; that ours is "the theology of the 



Eetribution not Kevenge. 57 

shambles." Our just retort is, theirs is the the- 
ology of dishonesty. None could declare more 
loudly than they that for a ruler to rob an obedi- 
ent subject of the reward pledged to his merit 
would be false, dishonest, unprincipled. We have 
proved along with the Scripture that the bond 
which connects just retribution with guilt is morally 
the same. Do they insist upon inventing a dishon- 
est divine ruler? The Psalmist says, that they who 
invent an imaginary god " are like unto him." So 
are they which " worship him." Were we as severe, 
we might justly say to our readers, You had better 
not entrust your social rights^evej^-to people who 
worship a god not governed by principle. 
. We now reach a point where we place our oppo- 
nents in a fatal dilemma. They say there cannot 
be any substitutionary punishment of guilt, that it 
would be an immoral legal fiction. Very well; 
then they and all their adherents are self-con- 
demned to an inevitable and everlasting hell ! For 
they certainly are sinners, and God's doctrine is 
that in his final judgment all sin is unpardonable. 
Sinners may be pardoned ; but the guilt never. 
For this, satisfaction must be made, if not through 
a substitute, then by the sinner himself. If, then, 
substitution is absurd and unrighteous, then we 
testify solemnly to these gentlemen that the sole 
result of their boasted philosophy will be, as surely 
as God is God, to seal them all, self -condemned, to 
perdition. 



CHAPTEK VI. 

(Efye tDitness of fjumcm Consciousness anb 
(Experience. 

THESE all confirm the proposition that, under 
a right moral government, punishment, either 
personal or vicarious, must follow guilt invariably. 
This is what is meant by that fear of death which 
is present, both instinctive and rational, in every 
human consciousness. Some men die calmly under 
the delusions of agnosticism, universalism , or utter 
weariness of life. Some, like the skeptic, David 
Hume, effect before company a cheerful indiffer- 
ence which they are far from feeling. But the 
average, the natural, and the reasonable state of 
the human spirit which is not sustained by a con- 
scious justification through Christ's vicarious right- 
eousness is to dread death, because it expects penal 
evil in another life. Why this dread and expecta- 
tion? "The sting of death is sin; and the strength 
of sin is the law ! " And this is the final judgment of 
the guilty conscience against itself in that most 
honest hour, when the approach of "death, that 
most potent, wise, and eloquent teacher," has dissi- 
pated the deceitful illusions of life and compelled 
the soul to face the truth. 

Reference has been made to the sacrifices re- 
58 



Witness of Human Consciousness. 59 

quired in the Old Testament. Eeason and Scrip- 
ture both declare that these were types, and that 
this is the principle which they teach by emblem : 
expiation must be made for guilt in order that 
pardon may take place. But as the meaning of 
pardon is that it releases the culprit himself from 
punishment, this needed expiation is to be made 
by a substitute. The lamb, the kid, the bullock 
are themselves "clean beasts," innocent of guilt, 
but they die in place of the guilty worshipper, in 
order that he may pray and be pardoned ; thus 
teaching the substitution of one innocent for the 
guilty, more clearly than any words. It is notice- 
able, moreover, that all pagan religions employ 
bloody sacrifice, either animal or human, and in 
the same sense. When idolaters pray, they feel 
that their gods must be propitiated. Why this? 
Because deep down in their consciousness they 
have the judgment, it may be surd and distorted, 
that, for the guilty, satisfaction must be made to 
their gods in order that they may be propitiated. 
The essential fact is, that this obstinate conviction 
inheres in the minds of all pagans and polytheists 
of all races and ages. Whence does it come ? Will 
our opponents answer that this is nothing but the 
persistence of a traditionary superstition derived 
from the ignorant and senseless usage of the first 
parents of the race? This provokes two questions 
in reply. Whence did these first parents get the 
usage ; and was it in fact the dictate of a senseless 



60 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

superstition, or of a command from God ? Reason 
and Scripture say the latter. The second ques- 
tion is harder: How comes it that such a tradition 
should persist through hundreds of ages, where 
similar traditions asserting the truths of God's 
unity, spirituality, and infinite perfections have 
been lost, although so much more obvious to right 
reason than the religious value of animal sacrifice ? 
The tradition would have been lost long ago from 
pagan minds were it not sustained by the echo of 
their own moral intuitions. 

We do not advance considerations drawn from 
the policy of God's rectoral relations to man as 
our foremost or most weighty arguments ; but they 
have their inferior place. When a superior being 
assumes the office of judge and ruler over men, he 
enters into moral relations with them; and, if he is 
perfect in wisdom and justice, he will infallibly ad- 
minister his judicial functions on that plan which 
is most promotive of the proper ends of his gov- 
ernment. Now, our opponents say that those 
ends are remedial and deterrent. But experience 
proves that the execution of penalties should be 
regular and invariable in order to secure these re- 
sults. The least uncertainty in the sequence of 
punishment upon transgression will raise in the 
mind of the man under temptation a doubt and a 
hope whether he, in this instance, may not sin and 
yet escape. This doubt weighs with the tempted 
mind much more than it is worth. The sinner's 



Witness of Human Consciousness. 61 

hope magnifies his chances of escape. Thus the 
ends of justice, and even of benevolent policy, re- 
quire of this Divine Ruler invariable regularity in 
punishing. This, in the end, must prove the most 
humane as well as the most impartial. If he al- 
lows some guilty persons to escape when others 
are punished, he loses that moral respect from his 
subjects which is so necessary to good government. 
Tolerated transgressions are as mischievous as they 
are illegal; they are contagious; they strongly 
threaten the welfare of the law-abiding. The ruler 
who is uncertain in attaching just penalties to the 
guilty raises this question, so damaging to his au- 
thority, in the minds of his subjects : What right 
has he thus to jeopardize our welfare, duly earned 
by obedience and guaranteed to us by the covenant 
of his own law, in order to favor the very law-break- 
ers who deserve no favor? Is this either just, wise, 
or benevolent ? 

So powerful is this inferior argument, drawn 
from the interests of the subjects of his moral gov- 
ernment; but we can never grant that these are 
its highest end. God's own glory presents an end 
unspeakably more worthy ; and it needs no exposi- 
tion to show that for that highest end absolute 
regularity, equity, and impartiality are necessary. 
If penalty follows the transgressions of some, it 
must follow the transgressions of all. " Shall not 
the Judge of all the earth do right ? " 



CHAPTEE VII. 
0ur Opponents' Self=£onirc^ictions. 

THEY insist that God's remission of sin must 
be unconditional, the result of simple good- 
ness, and yet none of them, not even the Socinians, 
dare to promise sinners forgiveness except upon 
condition of their repentance and reformation. 
Now, we also hold that these are necessary and 
meet for the state of the pardoned sinner, but not 
conditions precedent, not procuring causes of their 
pardon ; they are, in fact, after-consequences and 
fruits of that blessing. Christ's vicarious sacrifice 
has already provided its meritorious cause. While 
our opponents deny this, they yet strictly require 
repentance and reform, making them forerunners 
and procurers of pardon. They are thus com- 
pelled to teach that the forgiveness of sin is not 
and cannot be unconditional ; and after so stoutly 
denying that satisfaction to justice is prerequisite 
to God's mercy upon the guilty, they have to fabri- 
cate a species of satisfaction out of these two ac- 
tions of the guilty man himself. It is true their 
substitutes are unsuitable ; but by this invention 
they seem to admit that satisfaction for guilt is ne- 
cessary for the divine honor. This self-contradic- 

62 



Our Opponents' Self-Contradictions. 63 

tion is indeed fated ; the common sense and con- 
science of all men who think predestinated it. 

There are no professed Christians on earth who 
assert so loudly the blessed doctrine that God par- 
dons sin. But what is pardon ? Its most common 
and express name in Scripture is remission ; that is, 
aphesis. Now, what is remitted or removed? Not 
strictly the pardoned man's sin or sinfulness in the 
sense of his own personal attribute of evilness or 
opposition to God's holy law ; but his guilt, that is 
to say, his obligation to punishment therefor. 
Plainly, when Scripture speaks briefly of the aphe- 
sis of sins, it uses a metonymy, meaning by sins, 
literally, their guilt ; for the consciousness of every 
pardoned man in the world tells him that his per- 
sonal attribute of sinfulness has not yet been re- 
moved ; he tells God this in every confession, 
thanksgiving, and petition for further grace which 
his thankful and believing heart offers to his God. 
Is he lying to him ? Let the reader then pardon 
us for repeating this fundamental distinction, so 
simple and plain, yet so obstinately overlooked, 
between sinfulness, the attribute, and guilt, the 
penal obligation. And let us reaffirm what both 
Scripture and conscience assert of every pardoned 
man on earth, that while his guilt is wholly re- 
moved, sinfulness remains in him for a time. Now, 
then, whoever says that God pardons sin has 
therein said that God actually makes this separa- 



64 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

tion between the attribute and the obligation, which 
our opponents say cannot be made at all, because 
the two are inseparable. They conflict with all the 
Scripture in asserting that neither Christ nor any 
other person can be substituted under another's 
guilt ; and their main argument is, as we shall see, 
that guilt is inseparable from the personal sinful- 
ness which incurred it. But if this were true, all 
pardon of sinners remaining more or less sinful 
would be absolutely impossible ; and as our oppo- 
nents and we are all sinners, the only thing left for 
us is to make up our minds to go together to inevi- 
table perdition, like the lost angels, who have no 
substitute. Our adversaries seem to think that it 
is more reasonable our obligations should be trans- 
ferred nowhere else than to somewhere else. 

If the Kedeemer did not suffer for our sins, 
that is, for the guilt of them, he must have suf- 
fered for something, and that a very grand ob- 
ject. Our opponents, of all men, are bound to 
teach this ; for they say God's whole essence is 
love, by which they mean benevolence ; therefore 
causeless sufferings in his children must be more 
obnoxious to his feelings than any other thing in 
the world. Moreover, since Jesus is perfect in the 
Father's eyes, his causeless sufferings must have 
been most obnoxious to him of all ; they were, 
moreover, terrible and extraordinary in severity, 
worse than were ever endured by any innocent 



Our Opponents' Self- Contradictions. 65 

child of God. Therefore they must have had an 
object, and that of the grandest importance. What 
was it ? Our adversaries are not agreed between 
themselves in their answer. One set say that 
God's object was to give conclusive weight to 
Jesus' testimony for this truth, namely, that God 
certainly pardons sin on the ground of the sinner's 
repentance and reform; for when a man dies a 
martyr for his teaching, men are obliged to believe 
that it was true. Another set say that the object 
of Jesus' innocent sufferings and death was de- 
signed to add moral weight to his example as our 
pattern, especially in practicing the virtues of truth, 
moral courage, patience, and fortitude under ca- 
lamity. Still another set hold that the object was 
to soften and melt our hearts by sympathy with 
his sufferings ; and yet another, that God's object 
in the sacrifice of Christ was to make a dramatic 
display of his opposition to sin, even while pardon- 
ing the sinner, and so to prevent men's presuming 
too much upon his kindness. When we are taught 
that these are ends designed and secured through 
Christ's death, we respond, yes, they are secondary 
ends ; but in order that they may be such, they 
must be grounded in the great truth that he suf- 
fered legally and righteously for the guilt of sin 
imputed to him. Take away that foundation, and 
these purposes of Christ's sufferings become inex- 
plicable and worse than futile. We can reasonably 



66 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

assert all these as secondary results of the divine 
sacrifice ; in the scheme of our opponents they are 
contradictions and folly. First, the martyr's will- 
ing death does not prove the truth of his creed, 
but only his sincerity in it, perhaps even his stub- 
born pride in it, unless we know that he possesses 
infallible and divine wisdom ; second, Did God's 
providence permit and order the calamities and 
death of Jesus ? If the Father took no providen- 
tial note of or concern in the destiny of such a Son, 
at once the most admirable and the most impor- 
tant figure in human history, there is not a shadow 
left of proof that there is any providence over per- 
sons as insignificant as we are. This conclusion is 
to us practical atheism. If Providence did ordain 
the sufferings of Jesus, while he bore no guilt, then 
the case which we have is this : That God pun- 
ished, or intentionally permitted the punishment of 
the one man of purest and sublimest virtue who 
ever appeared on earth with miseries more dire 
than he ever visited upon a Cain or a Judas. 
What lesson of patience 01 fortitude under suffer- 
ing does this contain for us ? It would be only a 
lesson of hatred against the government we live 
under, and of horror and despair. And last : the 
gratuitous sufferings of Jesus would remain a dra- 
matic exhibition of God's hatred of innocence and 
virtue rather than of vice. But if the great truth 
be posited that a just ground was laid by Christ's 



Oue Opponents' Self- Contradictions. 67 

voluntary substitution under the guilt of a world 
for these penal sufferings, and that by them God's 
purity, adorable justice, and infinite love for the 
unworthy are gloriously manifested together, then 
all these moral and didactic effects of Christ's sac- 
rifice most truly result. 

From these deadly paradoxes there are but two 
evasions. One is to say that God's providence had 
nothing to do with the calamities and the murder 
of Jesus ; the other, that earthly miseries and death 
are not penalties for sin. The latter is the evasion 
of the old Pelagians when pressed by Augustine 
with the inexorable fact that infants, whom they 
pronounced sinless, meet with the same bodily evils 
and death with adult sinners. Let us see at what 
cost either of these evasions must be adopted. It 
has already been pointed out that, if Providence 
intervenes anywhere in human affairs, it certainly 
did so in the life and destiny of Jesus, because his 
is the most illustrious and important figure that 
has ever appeared among mankind, and because 
his career has already had more influence on hu- 
man history than anything else ever done on earth. 
And this is a just argument ad hominem, because 
all these rationalists adopt this theory of provi- 
dence : that God concerns himself therein with 
cardinal and influential events, but not with the 
ordinary current of effects arising out of common 
second causes. Therefore, he who denies a pro- 



68 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

vidence over the destiny of Jesus must logically 
deny providence everywhere ; and that, we repeat, 
is practical atheism ; moreover, it is virtual infi- 
delity. He who takes that position should flout 
the authority of all Scripture, because God's con- 
cern in the sufferings and death of Jesus is taught 
as expressly and as widely as any proposition in 
the Bible. There is no way to get rid of it except 
by trampling the authority of Scripture under foot. 
In Psalm xxii. it is, beyond all doubt, the Messiah 
who speaks through the mouth of David (verses 1, 
15): "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me?" (the very words of Jesus on the cross), and 
11 thou hast brought me into the dust of death." 
Isaiah liii. G : "The Lord hath laid on him the in- 
iquity of us all." Luke xxiv. 46: It is Jesus him- 
self who said to his apostles, "Thus it is written, 
and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise 
from the dead." John xix. 11: "Thou coulclest 
have no power at all against me, except it were 
given thee from above." Acts ii. 23 : Christ was 
"delivered by the determinate counsel and fore- 
knowledge of God." Romans viii. 32 : God " spared 
not his own Son, but delivered Mm up for us all." 
It is equally contrary to Scripture to say that 
any human sufferings and death are other than 
penal. Genesis ii. 17 : "For in the day that thou 
eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." Genesis iii. 
17, 19: "Because thou hast hearkened unto the 



Our Opponents' Self- Contradictions. 69 

voice of thy wife, cursed is the ground 

for thy sake For dust thou art, and 

unto dust shalt thou return." Romans v. 12: 
" Death passed upon all men, for that all have 
sinned"' '; and vi. 23: "The wages of sin is death." 
The very benevolence of God, on which our oppo- 
nents boast so much, proves that all human miser- 
ies and death must be just penalties for sin, and 
cannot be otherwise explained ; for it is proved that 
they are permitted and disposed by God according 
to his purpose. Did he not do this at the prompt- 
ing of his own justice, his infinite benevolence 
would forbid his doing it at all. Surely there can- 
not be a sharper self-contradiction than that of the 
men who say, in one breath, that God's perfect 
justice makes it impossible that he should inflict 
vicarious sufferings for guilt upon the voluntary 
substitute who is innocent; and in the next breath, 
that God is capable of inflicting similar penal evils 
upon multitudes of others, without reference to 
their guilt. 

This, then, is the word which common sense and 
honesty would speak to all our opponents: You 
say that you know intuitively and necessarily that 
there cannot be penal substitution of the innocent 
for the guilty under God's just government. Then 
cease to call yourselves Christians of any phase, 
degree, or sect; repudiate the Bible at once and 
wholly. Let the world know where you stand as 



70 Christ our Penal Substituie. 

simple infidels, like Chubb, Toland, Tom Paine, 
Voltaire, and Ingersoll. Consistency leaves you no 
other position, no middle ground ; for the Bible is 
too deeply committed to the doctrine which you 
disdain, to be any rule of faith at all, if you are 
right. 



CHAPTER VIII. 
CI]e €tl]tcal (Objection Consibcreb. 

THE grand and cardinal objection against 
Christ's substitution is the philosophic one. 
It has, therefore, been reserved for separate and 
special discussion. As already stated, its claim, 
as a moral intuition, that a just government, human 
or divine, cannot transfer one man's guilt to an- 
other who is innocent, under any possible condi- 
tions, because punishment loses its moral signifi- 
cance, and becomes cruelty and wickedness as soon 
as it is transferred from the sinning person to 
another. Their position cannot be stated more 
clearly and boldly than in the following words, 
quoted from one of their leading professors of 
philosophy: 1 "The first fundamental principle of 
ethics is that nobody can be righteous for any- 
body else. Righteousness is a thing that has to 
spring from the inmost personality of the person, 
and nobody can ever be a substitute either for my 
wickedness or my goodness. Hence, if we believe 
the teachings of reasonable ethics, we have got to 
learn to interpret the symbol of the cross in some 
other way than that old fashioned one We 

1 Professor Howison, University of California, 
71 



72 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

are convinced that, for better or worse, enlightened 
mankind has, in matters of belief, taken a final 
leave of mere traditions and of blank authority of 
miraculism in every form. It is accordingly clear 
to them that henceforth the only safety for human 
practice lies in founding it in philosophic criticism 
that shall be luminous, unrelenting, penetrating to 
the bottom." Or, otherwise stated : 

"When a man comes and tells me, for instance, 
that Christ died on the cross for my sins, that he 
offered up a sacrifice for my sins, and that by 
virtue of this alone God imparts to me the right- 
eousness of Jesus, if I exercise a mystic sentiment 
of faith, as it is called, I want to know how literally 
I am to take that ; for if I am to take it literally, 
then I, as a philosophical thinker, have to say, 
point blank, it is not true. 

The reader must understand what our opponent's 
position is, that whatever be the Bible's testimony 
for Christ's penal substitution, it cannot be true, 
because they know it to be false by an immediate, 
self-evident, necessary intuition, which is to say that 
they set their philosophy above all the authority 
claimed for God's word. To those who know the 
history of philosophy and the picture it presents of 
the uncertainty of human metaphysics, this tower- 
ing self-confidence would appear ludicrous were 
not the results so tragical. If the philosophy, 
which they worship, has settled anything, it has 



The Ethical Objection Considered. 73 

agreed, that these should be the traits of an intui- 
tive judgment ; it should be primary (resting upon 
no prior premises), self-evident, necessary, and uni- 
versal. Should it not have given some pause to 
their philosophic dogmatism to remember that 
most Christians for several thousand years sin- 
cerely believed what these dogmatists pronounce 
self- evidently false ? How was it that not only the 
most devout Christians, but the greatest thinkers 
and philosophers of all ages — a Lactantius, an 
Augustine, an Anselm, an Aquinas, a Luther, a 
Calvin, a Pascal, a Claude, a Turretin, a Butler, a 
Newton, a Chalmers, an Edwards, a Wesley, an A. 
Alexander, a Thornwell — saw no difficulty in this 
proposition which our Socinianizers find so un- 
speakably absurd? There is modesty with a ven- 
geance! One would think, to hear them, that 
intuitions had only been invented, like the tele- 
graph and telephone, in the nineteenth century. 
Again, how comes it that our new philosophers 
were not aware that this despised old Bible asserted 
precisely their proposition, that no one can have 
righteousness or wickedness for anybody but him- 
self, three thousand years before they were born? 
The old prophet said, "If thou be wise, thou 
shalt be wise for thyself: but if thou scornest, thou 
alone shalt bear it." Perhaps our opponents 
should have given the Bible, notwithstanding its 
offensive traits of inspiration and " miraculism," 



74 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

this much of credit, as not to be so silly and stupid 
as to contradict itself by then proceeding to teach 
penal substitution. It does teach both proposi- 
tions ; and had these readers been less overween- 
ing, and better acquainted with its contents, they 
would have seen at least a probable solution in 
this thought, that the predications in the two pro- 
positions are different, so that they do not contra- 
dict each other. And this will be found the real 
solution. 

Obviously, their cavil leads us into the midst of 
that famous Protestant contention, whether inspira- 
tion be entitled to make us admit what is to our 
minds a necessary self-contradiction, or whether the 
unquestionable presence of such a proposition in a 
writing claiming inspiration would not be good 
internal evidence against it ? Men who tread with 
such arrogance the narrow boundary line between 
logic and theology ought at least to know the an- 
swer which true theology gives to these questions. 
To the first we answer unhesitatingly, No; to the 
latter, Yes. This ground has been too thoroughly 
trodden in the long controversy between true the- 
ology and popery for the answer to be unknown to 
real scholars. These have not forgotten the famous 
apothegm in which John Locke summed up the 
Protestant position : that some propositions are 
agreeable to our reason, some are above it, and 
some contradict it* The first two kinds logical and 



The Ethical Objection Considered. 75 

rational men accept upon sufficient evidence ; it is 
the last kind only which they necessarily reject. 
The Protestant argument is short and clear. In 
order that any mind may have true and consistent 
intelligence, there must be in it at least some pri- 
mary and regulative principia of judgment. In 
order for a permanent rivulet, there must be a 
headspring. Second, most certainly that God, 
whose bosom is the eternal home of truth and in- 
telligence, who implanted these principia in us 
when he created our spirits in his own image and 
likeness, will not tell us anything which directly 
breaks and uproots these principles of thought. 
This, if attempted, could not be effectuated with- 
out uprooting our very intelligence, and thus ren- 
dering us incapable of receiving any rational incul- 
cations. But after this simple statement, it is very 
plain that we are not entitled to deny any propo- 
sition claiming to be taught by God, because it 
seems to conflict with any favorite judgment of our 
own, unless we are entitled to be certain that our 
judgment really is one of these necessary princi- 
ples of thought. And the history of human opin- 
ion warns us to be very modest and cautious here, 
for several reasons. We ought to know how prone 
our natural egotism makes us all to claim for our 
cherished opinions this self-evident authority, when 
in reality they are but deductions of our own, shaped 
by our prejudices and defective habits of thought. 



76 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

We ought to remember that, in the history of phil- 
osophy, several propositions have been long and 
almost universally held to be primary, self-evident 
truths, which a later and more correct philosophy 
showed to be not primary and even false. For in- 
stance, in the Middle Ages the whole world of 
physicists held it to be an axiom, that "nature ab- 
hors a vacuum." Nobody now believes that this is 
either an axiom or a truth. The Italian, Torricelli, 
exploded it by a question: Then how comes it 
that in the pump-stock nature does not abhor a 
vacuum above thirty-three feet? It is related that 
when Sir Isaac Newton published his Principia, 
his great German contemporary, Leibnitz, objected, 
claiming it as an axiom that no one body can com- 
municate energy to another body unless substan- 
tively present with it. So that Newton's induction 
of the attraction of gravitation, by which the mass 
of the sun pulls the earth and the moon at a dis- 
tance of ninety- five millions of miles, must be an 
error. And that he added, "I don't see how Sir 
Isaac is to keep his planets moving in their orbits 
unless he can get an angel to go behind and push 
all the time." Who now feels Leibnitz's difficulty ? 
It was with good reason, therefore, that while the 
great Protestant logicians refused to bind the hu- 
man intellect by the "implicit faith" of the popes, 
they guarded their doctrine in this manner. The 
self-contradiction asserted must appear between 



The Ethical Objection Considered. 77 

the obvious meanings of two express texts of Scrip- 
ture, or between such an expressed text and an un- 
questionable, necessary princvpium of thought, be- 
fore we are entitled to reject the professed Scrip- 
ture on this ground of self-contradiction. For, if 
the conflict exists only between an expressed text 
and one of our logical deductions, or between it and 
some gloss which we put upon another text, we have 
no right to say that there is self-contradiction. The 
error may be in our logic or in our gloss, not in the 
Scripture. 

Now do our Socinianizers practice any such 
wholesome caution in condemning the Bible doc- 
trine of penal substitution as absurd? They may 
exclaim, "Yes, it is an ethical intuition that one 
man cannot justly be made responsible for another 
man's righteousness or sin ; " yet the slightest close 
analysis will show that they are making a very 
shallow confusion of their pet proposition with 
another which is different. There is an intuition, 
universally held by thinking and just men, for which 
they mistake their opinion. The true predication is 
this : The consequences of righteousness or sin may 
not he transferred to another, unless he is in some 
way reasonably responsible therefor. Now, in or- 
der to identify this proposition (which everybody 
accepts) with theirs, they must assert that there is 
no way in which a moral agent can become reason- 
ably responsible except solely by personally doing 



78 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

himself the moral or immoral actions in question. 
Is that self-evidently true? Is it at all true? 
Manifestly not. They have heedlessly begged the 
whole question. Every good jurist, yea, every man 
of common sense, knows that there are other way3 
in which moral responsibility may attach besides 
the personal doing of the responsible acts, as by 
the voluntary assumption of the responsibility for 
the sake of some valuable consideration. Here is 
another class of instances. The law justly holds 
"accessaries before the fact" to a murder guilty of 
death. Here the law claims two victims for one 
murder, the life of the assassin and the life of the 
man who bribed him. Yea, if twelve men combine 
to hire him, there would be thirteen, each guilty of 
death for one and the same murder, while only one 
single hand perpetrated it. How comes this to be 
just? Because the twelve voluntarily associated 
themselves in the responsibility of an immoral act, 
which neither of them personally executed. Again, 
does the just law punish the accessory for the sin 
of suborning a murderer, or for murder itself? 
The correct answer is, for both : for his sin of su- 
bornation, because it was his own personal act and 
was evil, and for the murder, because he volunta- 
rily associated himself in the responsibility of it. 

Society presents other instances supporting our 
principle still more clearly. There are social dis- 
abilities which inflict real pain and calamity,, which 



The Ethical Objection Considered. 79 

are deserved by men's vices, and which follow them 
by regular moral law, and are therefore penal, a 
part of God's temporal punishment for transgres- 
sion. Not seldom society visits a part of these penal 
consequences upon persons who did not individu- 
ally transgress, but who are nearly connected with 
the actual transgressor. There are, for example, two 
citizens of high moral and social rank, each of 
whom has a marriageable daughter who is refined 
and beloved. One is sought in marriage by a John 
Doe, the other by a Richard Eoe. Both these young 
men are personally reputable, industrious, and intel- 
ligent. The one parent says to John Doe, you can- 
not have my daughter ; because a man whose father 
is now serving his long term in the penitentiary for 
a bad felony cannot be a son in my family, and hus- 
band to my pure daughter. The other parent gives 
the same refusal, and justifies it by reminding Ric- 
hard Roe that he is filius nullius. The young men 
sorrowfully protest, and urge that these misfortunes 
were not their own faults ; but each parent persists 
in declaring: I have nothing against you person- 
ally, but you cannot marry my daughter, become a 
son to her mother and a brother to my other chil- 
dren. But society fully justifies their decision, and 
there is not one of our opponents who would not 
concur. Here, then, is the partial transfer of penal 
responsibility where the consent of the second 
party is not even asked, yet the judgment may be 



80 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

just. Not seldom society presents counterpart 
cases which are settled upon the same principle. 
As a benefit is the antithesis of an injury, so grati- 
tude, recognizing the benefactor's moral title, is 
the counterpart to just resentment, recognizing the 
aggressor's moral title to punishment. Sometimes 
the children of a benefactor share with their father 
the fruits of the gratitude in the heart of the bene- 
ficiary; and all just men regard this as proper. 
Thus, Barzillai the Gileaclite had displayed a splen- 
did loyalty, at the risk of his hoary head, to King 
David, when in seemingly hopeless defeat. After 
his triumph over the conspirators, David expresses 
his gratitude and wishes to recompense Barzillai 
for his most opportune assistance by honors and 
enjoyments at court. The patriarch replies that 
he is now too old to enjoy such rewards, but he 
asks them for his son Chimham. Now, the history 
does not say that this youth had personally ren- 
dered any service to the king ; he was, probably, a 
boy under military age. But the claim of recom- 
pense for him rested solely upon the father's ser- 
vices, which David had just recognized. Did 
David demur ? Did he resort to any of this spurious 
ethical philosophy to argue that he owed Chimham 
nothing ? Not he ! He was too much the gentle- 
man, a gallant and honest soldier. So he answers 
without a moment's hesitation, "Chimham shall go 
with me." Tt is a curious sequel to this history, and 



The Ethical Objection Considered. 81 

in strange correspondence with the tenacious tradi- 
tions of the Orient, that many generations after- 
wards, there was at Bethlehem, the birthplace of 
David, a building still known as the caravansary of 
Chimham. It would seem that a part of the reward 
for his father's loyalty was a piece of property 
taken from David's private patrimony. Here, then, 
we have an unquestionable instance of the very 
thing which all our Socinianizers denounce as un- 
philosophical, contra- ethical, and absurd: one man 
rewarded for what another man did. 

Our opponents, therefore, in their cavil, conflict 
with the common sense of mankind and with the 
usages and laws of all families, tribes, and com- 
monwealths. What has so blinded them? We 
apprehend that they are misled very much by these 
three sophistical inferences. First, they observe 
that the principles of imputation and penal substi- 
tution are more rarely employed (they erroneously 
say never) in the ordinary civic laws of the civil- 
ized Christian nations. It is true that the use of 
these principles is much limited by the diminution 
of barbarism. So they jump to the conclusion that 
enlightened men have found out they are all wrong. 
Now, we explained in Chapter III. that the true 
reason why penal substitution is not much em- 
ployed by us in this age is that the magistrates can- 
not usually find a man who can fulfill the conditions 
requisite for the proper application of the principle, 



82 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

and not because we have found out it is essen- 
tially wrong. The grand importance of this point 
justifies its repetition. We expressly granted, that 
wherever there is man or angel under a just gov- 
ernment, human or divine, who is personally inno- 
cent, rectus in curia, and entitled to his franchise 
of immunity by his own satisfactory obedience to 
law, the just imputation of the guilt of another can 
never be made to that creature without his own 
voluntary consent. But usually lo such human 
creature can be found; and if found, he has no 
right to give that consent as to any capital guilt, 
and that is the reason human legislators and jurists 
cannot resort to the principle in their usual admin- 
istration. But in Jesus of Nazareth, the God-man, 
such a person was found for once, rectus in curia, 
above all law, having autocracy of his own life 
(John x. 18), and freely willing to give it to redeem 
the guilt of human sinners. 

In the second place, these mistaken men are 
misled by the "vain philosophy" of the utilitarians ; 
they persuade themselves that God's penal admin- 
istration is nothing more than a benevolent expedi- 
ency. Deluded by this ethical heresy, they insist 
on confounding retributive justice with mere re- 
venge. They will not see this vital and holy truth, 
that such justice is not malice, nor anger, but 
essential moral principle, the very same in essence 
with that which prompts a holy God to reward 



The Ethical Objection Considered. 83 

merit, and as absolutely determined to invariable 
action by God's essential perfections and immuta- 
bility as is his milder phase of the same attribute 
which rewards merit with blessedness. After thus 
stripping God of an essential attribute, what won- 
der if they misunderstand his moral administration? 
Their third source of error is equally shallow 
and influential with them. Being, in fact, little ac- 
quainted with the Bible, its exposition, its logic, 
and its theology, they fail to make the simple, but 
vital, distinction between righteousness and sinful- 
ness as personal moral attributes of rational agents 
on the one hand [entitled to reward and guilt 
(ohligatio ad poenam)] and their relations to the 
will of the Law-giver on the other hand. Then 
their common sense tells them, as it tells every- 
body else, that essential attributes, being subjec- 
tive personal qualities, are not transferable from 
the person whom they really qualify to another 
person. And so they jump to the non-sequitur that 
therefore guilt is equally untransferable, and its 
imputation an immoral legal fiction. We need no 
other specimen convicting them of this confusion, 
than the words of the learned professor already 
quoted: "The first fundamental principle of ethics 
is that nobody can be righteous for anybody else. 
-Righteousness is a thing that must spring from the 
inmost personality of the person, and nobody can 
ever be a substitute either for my wickedness or 



84 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

for my goodness." Just so ; if by righteousness, 
wickedness, and goodness, lie means a moral agent's 
subjective qualities, of course even a Calvinist 
says tlie same. But after lie fallaciously substi- 
tutes two different concepts of title to reward and 
guilt, which are not qualities but relations, his in- 
ference is worthless. We have overwhelmingly 
evinced this by many appeals to the customs and 
common sense of mankind. The professor himself 
would promptly discard it in any practical case 
affecting his own rights. In syllogistic form the 
process of thought would be this enthymeme : per- 
sonal subjective qualities are untransferable ; 
therefore a personal relation conditioned on actions 
which these qualities have determined, must be 
equally untransferable. Manifestly the suppressed 
premise must be the universal proposition : that all 
such relations are as inalienable^ or as incapable of 
being substituted as such subjective qualites. But 
who is absurd enough to believe that? Is there 
any such canon in logic or science? None! No 
true logician ever dreamed of it. If we return to 
the familiar science of algebra, for instance, nearly 
every process contradicts the proposition ; for the 
constant method of procedure is hy substitution, 
the substitution of new but equivalent values in 
place of those which first stood in our equations, 
to which new values the relations of equality, 
division or multiplicity are logically transferred. 



The Ethical Objection Considered. 85 

Nor does the fact, that in the cases under discus- 
sion the relations to "be transferred are conditioned 
on moral actions, make them an exception. On a 
utilitarian theory of the philosophy of punish- 
ments, there may be an appearance of such ground 
of exception. But that theory is worthless. 

Let us take the true theory, that the just punish- 
ment of guilt is dictated primarily by God's essen- 
tial attribute of distributive justice, not by expedi- 
ency; that the remedial and deterrent effects of 
punishments among human sinners who are still 
under a dispensation of hope are secondary and 
subordinate in God's purpose; and that in his 
punishment of reprobate men and angels, these 
have no place at all, but God's whole purpose is 
moral equalization in his government by the due 
requital of sin (just as by the due requital of 
righteousness) to the glory of his own holiness and 
honor. Then there remains no reason why this 
purpose of retribution, pure and simple, may not 
be as completely gained from a substitute as from 
the sinner, provided a voluntary substitute be 
found who is able to fulfill the other proper condi- 
tions. Such a substitute is our Messiah. 

The reasonableness and righteousness of this 
plan of vicarious redemption may be very shortly 
proved by pressing this plain question : Whom 
does it injure? God, the lawgiver, is not injured, 
for the plan is his own, and he gains in this way a 



S6 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

nobler satisfaction to the penal claims of law and 
to his own holiness, truth, and justice, than he 
would gain by the punishment of the puny creat- 
tures themselves. The Messiah is not injured, 
because he gave his own free consent, and because 
the plan will result in the infinite enhancement of 
his own glory. Certainly, ransomed sinners are 
not injured, because they gain infinite blessed- 
ness, and the plan works moral influences upon 
them incomparably more noble and blessed. The 
unsaved are not injured, for in bearing their due 
punishment personally they receive exactly what 
they deserve and precisely what they obstinately 
preferred to redemption in Christ. None of the 
innocent subjects of God's moral judgment on 
earth or in all the heavens are injured, because 
this vicarious redemption of believing men origin- 
ated a grand system of moral influences far sweeter, 
more noble, more pure, and more efficacious than 
those which they would have felt without it. But 
how can there he injustice when nobody is injured f 



CHAPTEK IX. 

tPbat Scripture Says of Substitution. 

MUCH of our argument has been run into trie 
field of rational discussion, because our op- 
ponents are rationalists, and they, by their attacks 
on God's truth, have made it necessary to follow 
them to their own ground. But the reader must 
not infer from this that we think that human philo- 
sophy is the superior, and Scripture the inferior 
source of evidence. Our comparative view of the 
sources of authority — a view taught by a long ac- 
quaintance with the contradictions, mutations, and 
vagaries of the most boastful human philosophies — 
may be truly expressed in the apostle's words: 
"Let God be true, but every man a liar." What 
saith the Scripture? When that is carefully and 
honestly ascertained, it should be the end of con- 
troversy. Therefore, the main thing which we have 
to allege in support of our thesis is this : that the 
doctrine of Christ's substitution under our penal 
obligations, and the imputation of his satisfaction 
for guilt to be the ground of our justification, is, 
either implicitly or expressly, taught throughout 
the Scriptures. It is so intertwined as an essential 
part of the whole warp and woof of the fabric that 

87 



88 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

it can only be gotten out of it by tearing it into 
shreds. This we shall now evince; First, By a 
brief array of the scriptural assertions of substitu- 
tion; and, Second, By showing how many other 
heads of doctrine which are cardinal in the Bible 
system are vitiated or impugned when that doc- 
trine is rejected. Decisive proof -texts are so nu- 
merous that all cannot be recited; all that can 
be here done is to classify the several groups of 
texts, giving sufficient examples under each group 
to show how they apply. This is also thoroughly 
trodden ground in Christian theology. All of its 
great teachers discuss the doctrine with sufficiency, 
and several of them with triumphant and exhaust- 
ive demonstration. Among these we will commend 
a purely biblical discussion, now too much out of 
fashion, Magee on The Atonement. He who will 
follow the Scripture citations and searching criti- 
cisms and expositions of this old book will be com- 
pelled to say that the doctrine of Christ's penal 
substitution, whether reasonable or not, is certainly 
taught in "Holy Writ." 

We find our first argument in the meaning of the 
Old Testament sacrifices. These were first insti- 
tuted by God in the family of Adam, before the 
gate of the lost Eclen. They were continued by 
God's authority under every dispensation until the 
resurrection of Christ. Moses gave perfect regu- 
larity and definiteness to the ordinances of bloody 



What Scripture Says of Substitution. 89 

sacrifice in the Pentateuch, which he did by divine 
appointment. Ancient believers knew that "the 
blood of bulls and of goats could not take away 
sin" by any virtue of its own. What, then, did 
the sacrifices mean? They were emblems and 
types, teaching to men's bodily senses this great 
theological truth, that "without shedding of blood 
is no remission," and its consequence, that remis- 
sion is provided for through a substitute of divine 
appointment; for fallen man is "a prisoner of 
hope," not of despair. Next, the antitype to this 
ever-repeated emblem is Jesus. " Behold the Lamb 
of God, which taketh away the sin of the world ! " 
(John i. 29; 1 Cor. xv. 3; 2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. viii. 
3 ; ix. 11-14.) Now let us add the indisputable fact 
that these bloody sacrifices were intended by God 
to symbolize the substitution of an innocent victim 
in place of the guilty offerer ; the transfer of his 
guilt to the substitute; satisfaction for it by the 
vicarious death, and the consequent forgiveness of 
the sinner. (Lev. i. 4; xiv. 21; xvii. 11, et passim.) 
The very actions of the worshipper and the priest 
bespoke these truths as strongly as the words. 
The guilty worshipper laid his hands upon the 
head of the victim while he confessed his tres- 
passes. Thereupon the knife of the priest de- 
scended upon its throat, the life-blood was sprin- 
kled upon the altar and upon the body of the wor- 
shipper, and the most vital parts of the animal — 



90 Chri&t our Penal Substitute. 

representing its living body in those cases where 
it was not a holocaust — were committed to the 
pure flames, pungent emblem of divine justice. 
Now, when the types so clearly signified substitu- 
tion and imputation, how can the great antitype 
mean less? Can it be possible that the shadow 
had more solidity than the substantial body which 
cast it before? 

But the great truth is expressly taught in Scrip- 
ture, in the following various forms and in many 
places, of which we cite only a few: Christ died 
"for us" "for the ungodly" (Rom. v. 6, 8; 1 Peter 
iii. 18, huper adikon), and for our sins. Socinians 
say, "True, he died, in a general sense, for us, in- 
asmuch as his death is a part of the agency for our 
rescue; he did die to do us good, not for himself 
only." The answer is, that in nearly every case 
the context proves it a vicarious dying for our 
guilt. Romans v. 9: "We are justified by his 
blood." 1 Peter iii. 18 : "The just for the unjust." 
Then, also, he is said to be antilutron for many. 
This preposition (anti) properly signifies substitu- 
tion, see Matt. xxvi. 28, for instance. " Himslf bore 
our sins;" "He bare the sins of many," and other 
equivalent expressions are applied to him. (1 Pet. 
ii. 24; Heb. ix. 28; Isa. liii. 6.) The verb used by 
Peter is bastadzein, whose idiomatic meaning is to 
bear or carry upon one's person. And these words 
are abundantly defined in our sense by old Testa- 



What Scripture Says of Substitution. 91 

nient usage. (Compare Num. ix. 13.) An evasion 
is again attempted by pointing to Matthew viii. 17, 
and saying that there this bearing of man's sor- 
rows was not an enduring of them in his person, 
but a bearing of them away, a removal of them. 
We reply that the evangelist refers to Isaiah liii. 4, 
not to liii. 6. And Peter says: "He bare our sins 
in his own body on the tree." The language is 
unique. 

Another unmistakable class of texts is those in 
which he is said to be made sin for us, while we 
are made righteous in him. (See 1 Cor. i. 30; 2 
Cor. v. 21.) A still more indisputable place is 
where he is said to be made a curse for us. (Gal. 
iii. 13.) The orthodox meaning, considering the 
context, is unavoidable. 

Again, he is said in many places to be our Re- 
deemer, i. e., Ransomer, and his death, or his 
blood, is our ransom (antilutron). (Matt. xx. 28 ; 
1 Peter i. 19; 1 Tim. ii. 6; 1 Cor. vi. 20.) It is 
vain to reply that God is said to redeem his people 
in many places, when the only meaning is that he 
delivers them; and that Moses is called the re- 
deemer of Israel out of Egypt, who certainly did 
not do this by a vicarious penalty. In these cases, 
either the word employed or the cor^ext proves 
that the deliverance was only a metaphysical re- 
demption, not like Christ's, a ransoming by actual 
price paid. Christ's death is a proper ransom, 



92 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

because the very price is mentioned. In Bible 
times the person ransomed was either a criminal 
or a military captive, by the rales of ancient war 
legally bound to slavery. The ransom price was 
a sum of money or other valuables, paid to the 
master in satisfaction for his claim of service from 
the captive. This is the sense in which Christ's 
righteousness is our ransom. 

It has been shown in a previous chapter at what 
deadly price our opponents seek to escape the 
patent argument, that if Christ did not suffer for 
imputed guilt, since he was himself perfectly right- 
eous, he must have been punished for no guilt at 
all. But this argument should be carried further. 
Even if we granted that the natural ills of life and 
bodily death are not necessarily penal, but come 
to all alike in the course of events, the peculiar 
features of Christ's death would be unexplained. 
He suffers what no other good man sharing the 
regular course of nature ever experienced, the 
spiritual miseries of Divine desertion, of Satanic 
buffetings, let loose against him, and of all the 
horrors of apprehended wrath which could be felt 
without personal remorse. (Luke xxii. 53; Matt, 
xxvi. 38, and xxvii. 46.) See how manfully Christ 
approaches his martrydom, and how sadly he sinks 
under it when it comes. Had he borne nothing 
more than natural evil, he would have been in- 
ferior to the merely human heroes ; and instead of 



What Scripture Says of Substitution. 93 

recognizing the exclamation of Rousseau as just, 
" Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ 
as a God," we must give the palm of superior for- 
titude to the Grecian sage. Christ's crushing 
agonies must be accounted for by his bearing the 
wrath of God for the sins of the world. 

The second head of our biblical argument is in- 
ferential in structure, yet scarcely weaker. When 
once Christ's proper substitution is denied, consis- 
tency forces men to pervert or deny most of the 
other doctrines which are characteristic of the 
gospel. Since these doctrines are also categori- 
cally taught in Scripture, that proposition must be 
false which necessitates their perversion. First, 
then, our assailants attack the divine essence by 
seeking to expunge one of God's immutable attri- 
butes, distributive justice. They have to tamper 
with all those Scriptures, whether literal or figura- 
tive, which ascribe that attribute unequivocally to 
God; and before they have gotten all of these 
texts out of the way, they have to employ methods 
of exposition so unfaithful and licentious as to 
leave Scripture practically worthless as a rule of 
faith. They give us a God of expediency, instead 
of a God of righteous and eternal principles. They 
either have to deny God's providence towards his 
holy son Jesus, or else to represent him as exer- 
cising that providence in a way which leaves him 
an object of mistrust and terror rather than of rev- 



94 Chbist our Penal Substitute. 

erence and faith. They must wrest the true ac- 
count of God's penal administration in this world 
and the next, so as to leave it incompatible with 
his omniscience and omnipotence, and even with 
that benevolence which they would make his sole 
essential attribute. 

Their doctrine concerning justice and punish - 
ishment constrains them, if they are consistent, to 
reject the whole history of Scripture concerning 
Satan and his angels. Indeed, the most of them 
avowedly do this. The Bible says most explicitly, 
that Satan and his angels are condemned for the 
guilt of rebellion, falsehood, malice, and soul-mur- 
der, and that they are to be punished forever. 
Plainly, men must either give up the theory that 
God's holiness in punishing can only be defended 
by representing his penalties as only a benevolent 
remedial expediency, or they must get rid of this 
whole history. Some do so by declaring it fabu- 
lous, which of course assails the veracity of pro- 
phets and apostles, and of Christ ; others, by rep- 
resenting all mentions of Satan and demons as mere 
impersonations of mischievous principles, a scheme 
of interpretation which may equally as well resolve 
the whole Scripture history into allegory. 

Of course, the everlasting punishment of repro- 
bate men must also be discarded. We must all be 
universalists. For, however guilty the criminals, 
there can be no everlasting punishments which 



What Scripture Says of Substitution. 95 

are manifestly not remedial, but only kill with the 
second death, and are not intended or expected to 
reform the sufferers, since they are to remain for- 
ever reprobate and grow worse and worse. Ever- 
lasting punishments cannot be explained as simply 
deterrent, because after the economy of redemp- 
tion shall be closed at the judgment day, and all 
pardoned men and holy angels shall have entered 
into the ''marriage supper of the Lamb," and shall 
be eternally guarded against evil example and temp- 
tation by the encircling walls of heaven, there will 
be nobody to deter. That is to say, nobody but 
the reprobate themselves, and they will not be de- 
terred from continued rebellion by their own suf- 
ferings, or by the example of their fellows' miseries. 
But if God know this perfectly well, he cannot be 
charged with the policy of inflicting so much 
wretchedness for an object which he forsees to be 
futile. 

The doctrine of original sin must be cast over- 
board. We must all become Pelagians also. For 
if the imputation of believers' guilt to Christ is an 
ethical absurdity, the imputation of Adam's guilt to 
our race must be worse, inasmuch as the consent of 
the race to this arrangement was not first obtained. 
Then we are left without any explanation why little 
children suffer the temporal penalties of sin before 
they are capable of intentional transgression and 
personal responsibility. All of that tremendous 



96 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

and tragical question is left without solution, to 
torture the hearts of sympathizing and bereaved 
parents. Have these precious little ones no prov- 
idence over them, and do they suffer and die un- 
der the remorseless grind of a physical machine, 
as cruel as it is unknowing, which these people 
call " nature " ? And while we stand watching their 
infant agonies, conscious of our impotence to stay 
the omnipotent machine, must we believe that 
there is no heavenly Father who concerns himself 
with their sufferings ? Or must we believe that he 
punishes where he sees no guilt? If there is no 
imputation, there can be no federal theology, no 
representative covenant of works or covenant of 
grace. The awful question, how birth-sin comes to 
infest the race of man, is left without any possible 
solution. 

The cardinal doctrine of justification must be 
corrupted in a similar manner. None assert more 
clearly than our opponents, that if the imputation 
of our sins to Christ be absurd, then the imputation 
of his righteousness to us must be equally so. 
Thus the inquirer, having lost all claim to the right- 
eousness of Christ as the meritorious ground of this 
pardon and acceptance, must seek an answer to 
the question, On what ground am I justified? For 
the sake of what am I to receive this precious title 
to immunity and reward, which I myself do not de- 
serve, if it cannot be for the sake of an imputed 



What Scripture Says of Substitution. 97 

righteousness ? Is this act of grace on God's part a 
moral act at all ? Would not this receive the neg- 
ative if God's act has no moral ground? Then 
something must be sought for, possessing moral 
quality, which the believer does for himself. What 
is it? Pelagians and Socinians answer that the 
ground of both pardon and adoption is the merit 
of the Christian's own penitence, new obedience, 
and reformed life. Those who are not willing so 
flatly to contradict Scripture tell us that it is the 
believer's faith ; that this being a moral act of the 
soul is graciously taken as a substituted righteous- 
ness for the life of obedience which he has not ren- 
dered. So he is justified not only by his faith, but 
on account of his faith. On either plan the true 
justification of the gospel is lost. 

The doctrine of indwelling sin and sanctification 
must also be perverted in order to bring them into 
line with the new doctrine. Combine these posi- 
tions. Christ's righteousness is indeed perfect, but 
cannot be imputed to us. God's law is perfect and 
requires a perfect obedience from us; otherwise 
our defects would still condemn us. But is the 
obedience of the most penitent and reformed Chris- 
tian actually perfect ? Must not perfection exclude 
even those defects and slips in duty which the best 
men in the world confess in themselves? Then 
the definition of perfection must be lowered. A 
perfect God and a perfect law call for a perfect 



98 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

life. Then the Pelagian dogma must be adopted, 
that the life which is prevalently right is perfectly- 
right, that righteousness and sin consist only in 
right or wrong acts of will, and that the believer 
who has unquestionable sincerity of purpose is, un- 
der this gospel law, the perfect man. Thus the 
remains of indwelling sin and concupiscence must 
be pronounced not peccatum verum, but only fomes 
peccati, incurring no real guilt. Thus is the purity 
of God's law degraded, and a debased standard of 
obedience set up, which always leads to an actual 
life still more debased than itself. Such is the 
havoc which is wrought in the whole system of be- 
lief of the man who has rejected Christ's substitu- 
tion, if he thinks consistently. The instructive 
fact is, that this error actually has led to all these 
perversions of doctrine in the creeds of sects which 
assert it. 



CHAPTEK X. 

Cfye testimony of Cfytstenbom, 

THE consensus of the Christian churches in 
their doctrinal standards does not amount to 
true inspiration ; and we hold no rule of faith to 
be infallible and of divine authority except God's 
own word. But this general concert of beliefs 
among the various denominations of God's chil- 
dren carries great probable weight for those points 
of doctrine whereon the agreement exists: "In the 
mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be 
established." The standards of a church are usually 
the mental work of its most learned and revered 
members, who have made most careful study of the 
Scriptures. Where so many good and competent 
men concur, notwithstanding the different points 
of view from which, and habits of thought with 
which, they inspect and construe God's word, there 
is the highest probability that their harmonious 
construction is the correct one. Our assailants 
should remember that when they talk of their "ad- 
vanced thought," their " intellectual progress," 
their "sloughing off of the old dogma," as super- 
stitious and antiquated rubbish, they are disdain- 
ing the combined scholarship of the greatest and 

99 



100 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

best men and of the most profound learning of all 
the centuries since Athanasius, and of all the 
nations and churches of Christendom. Such arro- 
gance is the surest sign of heedlessness and super- 
ficiality. 

The two ancient communions of the "Roman 
Catholics" and "Orthodox Greek 1 ' Christians are 
great and imposing for their antiquity, their learn- 
ing, and their numbers. We believe that their 
creeds involve numerous great and fatal errors, 
chiefly the accretions of human traditions and 
priestcraft before and during the Dark Ages ; but 
the Articles in which they still declare Christ's 
vicarious substitution for human guilt are the most 
respectable and least corrupted parts of their Con- 
fessions of Faith which come down to them from 
the creeds of earlier and purer ages. The force of 
their testimony is in this : that even these corrupt 
churches agree exactly with all the Protestant 
creeds concerning this ancient and vital doctrine. 
Hear, then, the Roman Church, in the "Dogmatic 
Degrees oi the Council of Trent," Session sixth, 
Degree of Justification, Chapter II.: "Him God 
proposed as a propitiation through faith in his 
blood for our sins," etc. And Chapter VII. : "Our 
Lord Jesus Christ .... merited justification for 
us by his most holy passion on the wood of the 
cross, and made satisfaction for us unto God the 
Father." 



The Testimony of Chkistendom. 101 

Hear also the witness of the Russo-Greek church, 
which now contains the vast majority of the so- 
called "Orthodox Greek Christians." The Larger 
Catechism of the Oriental Grecian and Russian 
Church, Article IV., ,Q ues ti on 208: "His voluntary 
suffering and death on the cross for us, being of 
infinite value and merit, as the death of one sinless, 
God and man in one person, is both a perfect satis- 
faction to the justice of God, which had condemned 
us for sin to death, and a fund of infinite merit, 
which has obtained him the right, without preju- 
dice to justice, to give us sinners pardon of our 
sins, and grace to have victory over sin and 
death." 

We now pass to the great Protestant confessions, 
citing, first, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession, 
Article III.: Christ "truly suffered, was crucified, 
dead and buried, that he might reconcile the Father 
unto us, and might be a sacrifice, not only for 
original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men." 
Again, Article IV. : " Their sins forgiven for Christ's 
sake, who by his death hath satisfied for our sins." 

The Formula Concordia, the latest and most 
conclusive confession of the Lutheran body, speaks 
thus, Article III., Section 1: Christ, "in his sole 
merit, most absolute obedience which he rendered 
unto the Father even unto death, as God and man, 
. . . merited for us the remission of all our sins 
and eternal life," 



102 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

The same is the witness of the great group of 
the Reformed Protestant churches. The Heidel- 
burg Catechism, Second Part, Question 12, Answer : 
" God wills that his justice be satisfied ; therefore 
must we make full satisfaction to the same, either 
by ourselves or by another." And Question 16: 
"Why must 'Christ' be a true and sinless man?" 
Answer : "Because the justice of God requires that 
the same human nature which has sinned should 
make satisfaction for sin ; but no man, being him- 
self a sinner, could satisfy for others." The Con- 
fession of the French Reformed Church, Article 
XVIII.: "We, therefore, reject all other means of 
justification before God, and without claiming any 
virtue or merit, we rest simply on the obedience of 
Jesus Christ, which is imputed to us as much to 
bear all our sins as to make us find grace and favor 
in the sight of God." 

The Belgic Confession (Dort, 1561), Article XX. : 
"We believe that God, who is perfectly merciful 
and also perfectly just, sent his Son to assume that 
nature in which the disobedience was committed, 
to make satisfaction in the same, and to bear the 
punishment of sin by his most bitter passion and 
death." • 

First Scotch Presbyterian Confession (1566), 
Article IX.: Christ "offered himself a voluntary 
sacrifice unto his Father for us ; ... he being the 
innocent Lamb of God was damned in the presence 



The Testimony of Christendom. 103 

of an earthly judge, that we should be absolved 
before the tribunal seat of our God." 

The Thirty-nine Articles, the doctrinal confes- 
sion of all Episcopalians throughout the world in 
the empires of Britain and the United States. 
Article II.: Christ "truly suffered, was crucified, 
dead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and 
to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but 
also for actual sins of men." 

The Confessions of the Waldenses, A. D. 1655, 
Section XIY. : God "gave his own Son to save us 
by his most perfect obedience (especially that obe- 
dience which he manifested in suffering the cursed 
death of the cross), and also by his victory over 
the devil, sin, and death." Section XV. : , . . . 
Christ "made a full expiation for our sins by his 
most perfect sacrifice." 

The Westminster Confession (1647) gives us the 
present creed of all the Presbyterian churches in 
the English speaking world, Scotch and Scotch- 
Irish, colonial, Canadian, and American. It is also 
the doctrinal creed of these great bodies, the Evan- 
gelical Baptist, and orthodox Congregationalists in 
Britain and America, being expressly adopted by 
some of them and closely copied by others, as the 
"Saybrook Platform" of New England. In this 
great creed, Chapter VIII., Section V., is this wit- 
ness : " The Lord Jesus, by his perfect obedience 
and sacrifice of himself, which he through the 



104 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

eternal Spirit once offered up unto God, hath fully 
satisfied the justice of his Father, and purchased 
not only reconciliation, but an everlasting inherit- 
ance in the kingdom of heaven, for all those whom 
the Father hath given unto him." 

"Methodist Articles of Keligion" (1784) are the 
responsible creed of the vast Wesleyan bodies of 
Britain and America. Many of these propositions 
are adopted verbatim from the " Thirty-nine Arti- 
cles." This is true of Article II. which contains 
an identical assertion, in the same words, of the 
doctrine of Christ's penal substitution. 

The Catechism of the "Evangelical Union" 
teaches these doctrinal views, in which all the 
churches concur which are represented in the 
"Evangelical Allianca" This document omits the 
peculiar, distinctive doctrines in which these 
churches differ from each other. It was the 
work of Dr. Philip Schaff, D. D., LL. D., 1862, 
Lesson XXVIIL, Question 4: "What did he 
(Christ) suffer there?" " He suffered unutterable 
pains in body and soul, and bore the guilt of the 
whole world." 

Such is the tremendous array of the most responsi- 
ble and deliberate testimonies of all the churches of 
Christendom, save one little exception, the Socinian, 
in support of our doctrine concerning the penal 
substitution of Christ. This testimony was not 
formulated in the gloom of the ninth or tenth cen- 



The Testimony of Chkistendom. 105 

tury: but between the sixteenth and nineteenth, 
after the great renaissance, after the splendid tide 
of Greek and Hebrew scholarship had reached its 
flood in large part, after the full development of 
the scholastic and modern philosophies, synchro- 
nously with or after the Augustan age of theologi- 
cal science and exegetical learning, just during 
the epoch of the grandest and most beneficial de- 
velopment of human culture which the world 
has hitherto witnessed, concurrently with the 
splendid birth and growth of those physical 
sciences which have created anew our civilization. 
In this our boast we have not claimed the guid- 
ance of that Holy Spirit which Christ promised to 
bestow continuously upon his visible church, and 
which its pastors sought in prayer and supposed 
they were enjoying in these their most solemn 
witnessings for their Master. As our opponents 
usually repudiate this spiritual guidance for them- 
selves, and prefer that of human philosophy, they 
will, of course, pay no respect to this higher claim. 
We only ask our readers to judge betwixt us, what 
is the modesty of that pretension which affects to 
thrust aside all these conclusions of the best ages 
as silly, antiquated, and self-evident rubbish. Is 
the irony of Job too caustic for this case? "Surely 
ye are the people, and wisdom will die with you." 



CHAPTEK XL 
Conclusion. 

EE VIE WING now the course of this discus- 
sion, we gather the following results: The 
scriptural objections against the fundamental 
Christian concept were found to be entirely in- 
valid and irrelevant. We found this concept justi- 
fied by the common sense and practical judgment 
of all men, and all ages, including our own, in 
their social relations, and still applied, in some 
cases, by the jurisprudence of the most modern 
Christian nations. We found the true reason of 
the limited application of these concepts by human 
magistrates, not in the essential injustice of the 
principle, but rather in the fact that men, under 
ordinary civil jurisdiction, cannot fulfill the condi- 
tions necessary for their proper application. We 
found God claiming for himself the just right to 
punish imputed guilt under certain conditions, 
and we perceive in his providence frequent in- 
stances of such judgments. We examined the 
philosophic cavil against this concept of substitu- 
tion whence our opponents claim a necessary in^ 
tuition against it, and we found their claim ground- 
less, their postulate irrelevant, and their philosophy 

106 



Conclusion. 107 

to be the false and degrading theory of the utilita- 
rian ethics. We traced their sophism to its proxi- 
mate source in a quite heedless and superficial 
neglect of the distinction between sinfulness and 
guilt ; a distinction so plain that the most common 
minds act upon it in their own secular moral judg- 
ments. We showed that the Scriptures, claiming 
divine inspiration, beyond all honest question, 
mean to teach penal substitution and imputation ; 
and that their denial necessitates the rejection of 
the most cardinal propositions clearly taught in 
these Scriptures. So that dissentients have no 
option except avowed infidelity or acquiescence in 
our doctrine. We arrayed the consensus of Christ- 
endom, showing that not only the popish and 
Greek communions, but all the Protestant, with 
one small exception, with all their best learning 
and logic, hold to our proposition as a necessary, 
constituent part of their common system of doc- 
trine. 

This, then, is our conclusion concerning the bit- 
ter death of the holy Messiah as given in the in- 
spired words of Isaiah liii. 5, 6 : " But he was 
wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised 
for our iniquities ; the chastisement of our peace 
was upon him ; and with his stripes we are healed. 
All we like sheep have gone astray ; we have 
turned every one to his own way ; and the Lord 
hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." Is this an 



108 Cheist oue Penal Substitute. 

astonishing doctrine? Is the conception above 
the range of human imagination. So let it be. 
It may be that only the divine wisdom was ade- 
quate to excogitate it, and only the infinite divine 
love was capable of applying it for the salvation of 
enemies. "We thank God that it is not a deduc- 
tion or invention of man's philosophy, but a reve- 
lation from omniscience. But after God has au- 
thorized us to think this thought, we find in it 
nothing but supreme reason, justice, holiness, and 
benignity. These high revelations of the necessity 
of satisfaction for sin, grounded in the immuta- 
bility of God's * distributive justice, complete, and 
exalt our conception of him and his government. 
When we discard the ethics of expediency, place 
the disciplinary results of chastisement in their 
subordinate rank amidst God's purposes, and when 
we recognize the truth that his supreme end in 
punishing is the impartial satisfaction of eternal 
justice, all reasonable difficulties concerning the 
transfer of guilt and penalty, the proper conditions 
being present, vanish away. Towards guilty but 
pardoned men God does pursue in the infliction of 
pains a remedial and disciplinary purpose ; but 
when he comes to deal in justice with men and 
angels who are finally reprobate, these ends are 
absent ; the only one which remains is the retribu- 
tive one. To secure this end, the punishment of a 
substitute may be as truly relevant as of the guilty 



Conclusion. 109 

principal, provided the adequate substitute be 
found, and his own free consent obviates all charge 
of injustice against him personally ; for now law is 
satisfied, guilt is duly punished, though the guilty 
man be pardoned. The penal debt is paid, as 
truly and fairly paid as is the bond of the insolvent 
debtor when his independent surety brings to the 
creditor the full tale of money. But let us suppose 
that the wisdom and power of God the Father and 
the infinite majesty and love of the Son combine 
to effect a substitution by which impartial justice 
and law are more gloriously satisfied than by the 
condign punishment of the guilty themselves. 
Then is a result obtained unspeakably more hon- 
orable, not only to justice, but to the divine love 
and every other attribute. God is revealed full- 
orbed in his righteousness, no longer wrenched 
out of true moral symmetry by man's poor utilita- 
rian ethics. Impartial justice appears even more 
adorable than in the punishment of the personally 
guilty. When God pours out his retributive jus- 
tice upon the guilt of men and angels who have 
insulted him, cavilling creatures, in their blindness 
and enmity, might charge that he was indulging, 
at least in part, a personal resentment inflamed by 
their outrages ; but when they see him visit this 
justice upon his only begotten Son, infinitely holy 
in his eyes, notwithstanding his eternal and divine 
love, men and devils are obliged to admit that this 



110 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

is the action of nothing but pure, impersonal 
equity, as absolutely free from the taint of malice 
as it is majestic and awful. When we see that 
while, on the one hand, immutable righteousness 
restrains the Father from setting aside his penal 
law at the prompting of mere pity, infinite love 
makes him incapable of consenting to the deserved 
perdition of sinners, and makes him willing to sac- 
rifice the object worthier and dearer in his eyes 
than all the worlds rather than endure the specta- 
cle of this immense woe ; we gain a revelation of 
God's love more glorious and tender than any 
other doctrine can teach. Our opponents charge 
that we obscure the delightful attribute of benevo- 
lence in God in order to exaggerate the awful at- 
tribute of vengeance. In truth we do just the 
opposite. It is our doctrine as taught by the gos- 
pel, which reveals depths and heights of the divine 
tenderness and love, which neither men nor angels 
could have otherwise imagined. The Socinian 
says that God's love is such an attribute as prompts 
him to forgive sin at the expense at once of the 
order of his great kingdom and of the glory of his 
own consistency. A very deep pity this! but a 
pity equally weak and unwise. The gospel teaches 
us that there is in God a pity infinitely deep, and 
equally wise and holy. 

Let us suppose a human brother most gracious 
and virtuous who should speak thus: "I cannot 



Conclusion. Ill 

sacrifice principle and honor to save my erring 
younger brother; but I am willing to sacrifice my- 
self. I cannot lie to save him, but I will die to 
save him." This declaration would excite in every 
just mind glowing admiration. Such an elder 
brother would be a feeble type, in his combined 
integrity and pitying love, of the God-man; and 
he answers uo that in these exalted affections he 
represents exactly the attributes of the whole 
Trinity. 

God's permission of evil among his creatures 
has ever been the insoluble mystery of theology, 
as it has ever been the grand topic of infidel cavils. 
Here has been through all the centuries the chief 
battle-ground of the Christian apologists against 
atheists and agnostics. It is from the apparent 
impossibility of reconciling God's voluntary per- 
mission of evil with his own attributes that all 
systems of dualism, such as those of Magians and 
Manicheans, have taken' their pretext. If the 
Christian pleads that whenever a rational creature 
abuses his free agency by turning to sin, natural 
evil or misery must follow by an inevitable law of 
sequence as much natural as it is judicial, and that 
therefore it is the wilfully erring creature, and not 
God, who is responsible for all the misery in the 
universe, Infidels are not satisfied. They rejoin : 
then if your God is omniscient he foreknew all the 
wretched results of this law ; if he recognized it as 



112 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

a necessary natural law grounded in the very 
nature of free agents, and not proceeding primarily 
from his own retributive purpose and sentence, 
then he must have foreseen that it was necessary 
to protect his universe from moral evil or sin in 
order to save it from natural evil or misery, the un- 
avoidable sequel of sin. Now, if he is what the 
Christians describe, he must have created all his 
rational creatures in moral purity and innocency. 
Why did he not take the pains 'to keep them all 
innocent, and thus to save them from the misery? 
They say that he is an absolute sovereign, that he 
is omniscient, that he is omnipotent, and that he is 
also infinitely benevolent. If he has all these at- 
tributes, then he was able effectually to keep all 
his rational creatures holy ; if he is infinitely be- 
nevolent, he must have felt a controlling motive to 
do so. It was vain for a Bledsoe, they argue, to 
attempt the evasion of this deadly point by saying, 
that the will of a moral free agent cannot be effect- 
ually controlled from without consistently with his 
free agency; for this is precisely what the Chris- 
tian has no right to say. He teaches that it is 
proper for men to pray to God to regenerate and 
sanctify their sinful fellow-men. If prayer is an- 
swered, God is doing this very thing, controlling 
their sinful free agency from without. Again, the 
Christian says that there is an everlasting heaven, 
inhabited by elect angels and men, who are to re- 



Conclusion. . 113 

main forever holy and happy. Since these are 
still finite, the certain perpetuity of holy choice in 
them must be the effect of God's grace. It must 
be true, then, that he who is able to keep a Gabriel 
or a human saint forever holy in heaven, and who 
is able to convert a wicked Saul of Tarsus, could 
also have preserved a Satan and an Adam from 
apostasy without injuring their free-agency. Or 
if a Leibnitz offers us his ingenious optimism 
as a solution, teaching that God chose this pre- 
sent universe, notwithstanding the sin and misery 
which are in it, as, on the whole, the best pos- 
sible universe; the assailants remain unsatisfied. 
They rejoin, that if God is absolutely sover- 
eign, omniscient, and omnipotent, he is able to 
construct a universe containing everything that is 
holy and good in the actual universe, without any 
of the evils ; so that this mixed universe is not 
the best possible one for him. And here the 
argument pauses, leaving the mystery of God's 
permission of evil, palliated indeed by our collat- 
eral arguments, but still unsolved. 

The triumphant refutation of the caviller is our 
doctrine of redemption through Christ's substitu- 
tion, and nowhere else. These are the essential 
points of our defence of God's providence : First, 
The restoration of Adam's apostate race was in no 
sense necessary to God's personal interest, glory, 
or selfish welfare. He is all-sufficient unto him- 



114 Christ our Penal Substitute. 

self. He was infinitely blessed and happy in him- 
self before Adam's race existed. When it fell, he 
could have vindicated his own glory, as he did in 
the case of Satan and his angels, by the condign 
punishment of all men. He could have created 
another world and another race, fairer than ours, to 
fill the chasm made by our fall. Second, The price 
which he paid in order to avoid this just result of 
sin in our fallen race was the death of the God- 
man. Since the co-equal Son was incarnate in 
him, he was a person dearer and greater in God's 
eyes than any world, or all the worlds together. 
Being infinite, God-Messiah bulks more largely in 
the dimensions of his being than all the creatures 
aggregated. He was more worthy and lovely in 
the Father's view than any holy creature, "But 
God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while 
we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." This 
great fact may not open to us the deep secret of 
the permission of evil — perhaps no finite mind 
could fully comprehend it were its revelation at- 
tempted — but the glorious sacrifice of love does 
prove that no defect of divine benevolence can 
have had part in this secret. Had there been in 
God's heart the least lack of infinite mercy, had 
there been a single fibre of indifference to the 
misery of his creatures, Christ would never have 
been given to die for the guilt of men. The Mes- 
siah is our complete theodicy! But he cannot be 



usAV: 



Conclusion. 115 

such to the Socinian or the Arian, who denies his 
infinite Godhead, nor to any who deny his right- 
eous vicarious substitution. In a word, God's 
moral government, in its ultimate conclusion, must 
be as absolute and perfect as his own nature ; for, 
being supreme and almighty, he is irresponsible 
save to his own perfections. Therefore, if he is a 
being of infinite perfections, his government must 
be one of righteous final results. It will be an 
exact representation of himself, for he makes it 
just what he pleases. If there is moral defect in 
the final adjustment, it can only be accounted for 
by defect in God. It must be an absolute result, 
because the free act of an infinite being. The God 
whom we adore, to whom we peacefully entrust 
our everlasting all, "is infinite, eternal, and un- 
changeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, 
justice, goodness, and truth," 



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